How far did any knowledge or love of the old romantic literature of England survive among the contemporaries of Dryden and Pope? It is not hard to furnish an answer to this question. The prefaces of Dryden, the critical treatises of Dennis, Winstanley, Oldmixon, Rymer, Langbaine, Gildon, Shaftesbury, and many others, together with hundreds of passages in prologues and epilogues to plays; in periodical essays like the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_; in verse essays like Roscommon's, Mulgrave's and Pope's; in prefaces to various editions of Shakspere and Spenser; in letters, memoirs, etc., supply a mass of testimony to the fact that neglect and contempt had, with a few exceptions, overtaken all English writers who wrote before the middle of the seventeenth century. The exceptions, of course, were those supreme masters whose genius prevailed against every change of taste: Shakspere and Milton, and, in a less degree, Chaucer and Spenser. Of authors strictly mediaeval, Chaucer still had readers, and there were reprints of his works in 1687, 1721, and 1737,[1] although no critical edition appeared until Tyrwhitt's in 1775-78. It is probable, however, that the general reader, if he read Chaucer at all, read him in such modernized versions as Dryden's "Fables" and Pope's "January and May." Dryden's preface has some admirable criticism of Chaucer, although it is evident, from what he says about the old poet's versification, that the secret of Middle English scansion and pronunciation had already been lost. Prior and Pope, who seem to have been attracted chiefly to the looser among the "Canterbury Tales," made each a not very successful experiment at burlesque imitation of Chaucerian language. Outside of Chaucer, and except among antiquarians and professional scholars, there was no remembrance of the whole _corpus poetarum_ of the English Middle Age: none of the metrical romances, rhymed chronicles, saints' legends, miracle plays, minstrel ballads, verse homilies, manuals of devotion, animal fables, courtly or popular allegories and love songs of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Nor was there any knowledge or care about the masterpieces of medieval literature in other languages than English; about such representative works as the "Nibelungenlied," the "Chanson de Roland," the "Roman de la Rose," the "Parzival" of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the "Tristan" of Gottfried of Strasburg, the "Arme Heinrich" of Harmann von Aue, the chronicles of Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissart, the "Morte Artus," the "Dies Irae," the lyrics of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadour, and of the minnesinger Walter von der Vogelweide, the Spanish Romancero, the poems of the Elder Edda, the romances of "Amis et Amile" and "Aucassin et Nicolete," the writings of Villon, the "De Imitatione Christi" ascribed to Thomas a Kempis. Dante was a great name and fame, but he was virtually unread.