the portion of the Temple of Fame which was not directly borrowed from Chaucer is merely a school-boy's theme in verse. The manner in which Pope sets forth his worthies is not, for him, felicitous. His portraits are nearly all faint and feeble sketches, without distinctness of outline, individuality of feature, or brilliancy of colouring. The contemporary literature of the middle ages could not compete with the classical masterpieces, and Chaucer might have been justified in peopling his House of Fame with ancients alone. But he does not believe that genius and grandeur expired with the Romans. He has faith in authors whose light has long since been dimmed or extinguished, and confidently ranks such writers as Guido de Columpnis and Geoffrey of Monmouth with the loftiest Greek and Latin names. The statues of minstrel bards, musicians, and professors of magic adorn the exterior of the palace; the wall within is crowded with heralds, and on their coats are embroidered the armorial ensigns of all the persons who had been famous in Europe, Asia, and Africa since chivalry began. Everywhere we have the true reflection of the world in which Chaucer lived. His narrative represents the fourteenth century, its actual pursuits and genuine tastes, while the modernised version of Pope is stripped of circumstantial realities, and exhibits only an impassive, artificial pedantry. The architecture of Pope's Temple and Chaucer's House presents the same difference which distinguishes the respective poems throughout. The House is in the magnificent Gothic of the time, with its multiplied buttresses, niches, images, pinnacles, and traceried windows. The Temple is a building which resembles nothing that ever existed. One face is Grecian architecture, a second Eastern, a third Egyptian, and a fourth Northern. Warton, in a note to the poem, says that Pope's "knowledge and taste in the fine arts were unquestionable." Had he possessed the crudest ideas of architecture he could not have affirmed that so hideous, and indeed so impossible a combination, surpassed in beauty whatever had been "beheld in proud Rome, or artful Greece, or elder Babylon." The details are worthy of the general conception. The northern side is said to be "of Gothic structure,"--not the glorious style which commonly bears the name, a style for which Pope had no eyes, since with Chaucer's description before him he ignores the mediæval Gothic altogether, but a structure lustrous as glass, and "overwrought with ornaments of barbarous pride." "Huge colosses rise" upon its face, and around the statues are "engraved Runic characters." This part of the design appears to be an importation from the south. In the Egyptian temples colossal figures are often attached to the piers, and at the top, bottom, and sides of the piers there is a border of hieroglyphics. With his statues Pope has conjoined "rude iron columns smeared with blood" upon which stand the "horrid forms of Scythian heroes," and in a