[Footnote 126: _Gat-toothed_, according to Chaucer; meaning nothing more than _goat-toothed_, which, applied to such a character, has an obvious meaning. The commentators, however, chose to read _gap-toothed_, as of more easy explanation.] [Footnote 127: Alluding here, as elsewhere in the preface, to Jeremy Collier and Luke Milbourne, who had assailed not only his writings, but his moral character, with great severity.] [Footnote 128: To whom "Don Sebastian" is dedicated. See Vol. VII. page 281. He died in 1696-7.] [Footnote 129: This literal error was corrected by Tyrwhitt, from the better MSS. of Chaucer, being in fact, not a blunder of the poet, but of the press.] [Footnote 130: This lady lived to the age of ninety-four. Her huge romances, "Artamenes, Clelia, and Cleopatra," were in my childhood still read in some old-fashioned Scottish families, though now absolutely forgotten, and in no chance of being revived. Mademoiselle de Scuderi died about eighteen months after this discourse was written. There is no reason to think she was seriously engaged in translating Chaucer, whose works certainly never existed in the old Provençal or Norman French, into which last they were more likely to have been translated.] [Footnote 131: Pope, however, modernized this prologue, and, it is said, some of Chaucer's looser tales, though the latter were published under the name of Betterton. _Malone_, vol. iv. p. 631.] [Footnote 132: The allusion, in Boccace, was probably to his own poem, the "Theseida," a work so scarce, as almost never to have been heard of, until it was described by Tyrwhitt, in his Essay concerning the Originals whence Chaucer drew his tales. It contains the whole story of Palamon and Arcite. But the tale itself was more ancient than the days of Boccace.] [Footnote 133: There seems to have been something questionable in Milbourne's character. Dryden, a little lower down, hints, that he lost his living, for writing a libel upon his parishioners.] [Footnote 134: "Prince Arthur," and "King Arthur," two works, facetiously entitled epic poems, published in 1695 and 1697. In the preface to the first, occurred the following severe attack upon Dryden, which is inserted by Mr Malone as illustrative of the passage in the text.