For this reason,
though he must always be thought a great poet, he is no longer esteemed
a good writer; and for ten impressions, which his works have had in
so many successive years, yet at present a hundred books are scarcely
purchased once a twelvemonth; for as my last Lord Rochester said,
though somewhat profanely, "Not being of God, he could not stand".
Chaucer followed nature everywhere, but was never so bold to go beyond
her; and there is a great difference of being _poeta_ and _nimis poeta_
if we believe Catullus, as much as betwixt a modest behaviour and
affectation. The verse of Chaucer, I confess, is not harmonious to us,
but it is like the eloquence of one whom Tacitus commends, it was
_auribus istius temporis accommodata_: they who lived with him, and
some time after him, thought it musical; and it continues so even in
our judgment, if compared with the numbers of Lydgate and Gower, his
contemporaries; there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it,
which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect. It is true I cannot
go so far as he who published the last edition of him; [Footnote: That
of 1687, which was little more than a reprint of Speght's editions
(1598, 1602).
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