The _Fables_, in which this poem appears, were published in 1700. The word fable as here used by Dryden holds its original meaning of story or tale. Besides the _Palamon and Arcite_, he paraphrased from Chaucer the _Cock and the Fox_, the _Flower and the Leaf_, the _Wife of Bath's Tale_, the _Character of the Good Parson_. From Boccaccio he gave us _Sigismonda and Guiscardo, Theodore and Honoria_, and _Cymon and Iphigenia_, while he completed the volume with the first book of the _Iliad_, certain of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, the _Epistle to John Driden, Alexander's Feast_, and an _Epitaph_. The _Fables_ were dedicated to the Duke of Ormond, whose father and grandfather Dryden had previously honored in a prose epistle, full of the rather excessive compliment then in vogue. _Palamon and Arcite_ is itself preceded by a dedication in verse to the Duchess of Ormond. In the graceful flattery of this inscription Dryden excelled himself, and he was easily grand master of the art in that age of superlative gallantry. The Duke acknowledged the compliment by a gift of five hundred pounds. The preface to the volume is one of Dryden's best efforts in prose. It is mainly concerned with critical comment on Chaucer and Boccaccio; and, though it lacks the accuracy of modern scholarship, it is full of a keen appreciation of his 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: