great forerunners.

The work of Dryden in _Palamon and Arcite_ may seem to us superfluous,
for a well-educated man in the nineteenth century is familiar with his
Chaucer in the original; but in the sixteenth century our early poets
were regarded as little better than barbarians, and their language was
quite unintelligible. It was, therefore, a distinct addition to the
literature of his age when he rescued from oblivion the _Knight's Tale_,
the first of the _Canterbury Tales_, and gave it to his world as
_Palamon and Arcite_.

Here, as in his translations, Dryden catches the spirit of his original
and follows it; but he does not track slavishly in its footprints. In
this particular poem he follows his leader more closely than in some of
his other paraphrases, and the three books in which he divides his
_Palamon and Arcite_ scarcely exceed in length the original _Knight's
Tale_. The tendency toward diffuse expansion, an excess of diluting
epithets, which became a feature of eighteenth-century poetry, Dryden
has sensibly shunned, and has stuck close to the brisk narrative and
pithy descriptions of Chaucer. If the subject in hand be concrete
description, as in the Temple of Mars, Dryden is at his best, and
surpasses his original; but if the abstract enters, as in the
portraiture on the walls, he expands, and when he expands he weakens. To
illustrate:


"The smiler with the knif under the cloke"


has lost force when Dryden stretches it into five verses: