This gentle May fulfillèd of pite, Right of her hand a letter makèd she; In which she granteth him her very grace; There lacked nought but only day and place. And when she saw her time upon a day To visite this Damian goeth May, And subtilely this letter down she thrust Under his pillow; read it if him lust. She taketh him by the hand, and hard him twist So secretly, that no wight of it wist, And bade him be all whole; and forth she went To January, when that he for her sent. Up riseth Damian the nexte morrow; All passed was his sickness and his sorrow.] [Footnote 42: The Epicurean philosophers.] [Footnote 43: Addison's Letter from Italy: My humbler verse demands a softer theme, A painted meadow, or a purling stream.] [Footnote 44: Pope has here shown his judgment in adopting the lighter fairy race of Shakespeare and Milton. Chaucer has king Pluto and his queen Proserpina.--BOWLES. There was not much judgment required. They are fairies in Chaucer, but, as was not unusual in his day, he called them by names taken from the heathen mythology. Pope merely dropped the classical appellations, which would have been an incongruity when he wrote. In the details of his description he did not copy Shakespeare or Milton, but Dryden's version of Chaucer's Wife of Bath: The king of elfs, and little fairy queen Gambolled on heaths, and danced on ev'ry green.] [Footnote 45: Another couplet preceded this in the first edition: Thus many a day with ease and plenty blessed Our gen'rous knight his gentle dame possessed.] [Footnote 46: Dryden's Palamon and Arcite: Nor art, nor nature's band can ease my grief, Nothing but death, the wretch's last relief.] [Footnote 47: There is a natural trait in the original which is not preserved by Pope. The knight weeps piteously at his sudden calamity: But atte last, after a month or tweye, His sorrow gan assuage sooth to say; For when he wist it may not other be He patiently took his adversitie. This is one of the deeper and more solemn touches which Pope systematically rejected. Although the old man gets reconciled to the loss of his sight, his jealousy remains unabated.] [Footnote 48: Oh! January, what might it thee avail If thou might see as far as shippes sail? For as good is blind deceivèd be, As to be deceivèd when a man may see.] [Footnote 49: Chaucer only says that they whispered through the crevice they discovered in the wall which divided the houses of their parents. All their kisses were bestowed upon the wall itself, or as Sandys puts it in his translation of Ovid, Their kisses greet The senseless stones, with lips that could not meet.] [Footnote 50: This couplet, which is not in the original, is in the style of the pastorals which were common in Pope's youth.] [Footnote 51: