"Next stood Hypocrisy, with holy leer; Soft smiling, and demurely
looking down, But hid the dagger underneath the gown: The assassinating
wife, the household fiend, And far the blackest there, the traitor-
friend."


The anachronisms in the poem are Chaucer's. When he put this story of
Greek love and jealousy and strife into the mouth of his Knight, he was
living in the golden age of chivalry; and he simply transferred its
setting to this chivalrous story of ancient Greece. The arms, the lists,
the combat, the whole environment are those of the England of Edward
III, not the Athens of Theseus. Dryden has left this unchanged,
realizing the charm of its mediaeval simplicity. As Dryden gives it to
us the poem is an example of narrative verse, brisk in its movement,
dramatic in its action, and interspersed with descriptive passages that
stimulate the imagination and satisfy the sense.

Coming as it did in the last years of his life, the poem found him with
his vocabulary fully developed and his versification perfected; and
these are points eminently essential in narrative verse. When Dryden
began his literary career, he had but just left the university, and his
speech smacked somewhat of the pedantry of the classical scholar of the
times. Then came the Restoration with its worship of French phrase and
its liberal importation. His easy-going life as a Bohemian in the early
sixties strengthened his vernacular, and his association with the wits
at Will's Coffee House developed his literary English. A happy blending
of all these elements, governed by his strong common sense, gave him at
maturity a vocabulary not only of great scope, but of tremendous energy