_Chaucer_ meets him in one of our coffee-houses, and after the usual ceremonies were over between two strangers of their wit and learning, thus accosts him. Sir, cries _Chaucer_, you have done me a wonderful honour to furbish up some of my old musty tales, and bestow modern garniture upon them, and I look upon myself much obliged to you for so undeserved a favour; however, Sir, I must take the freedom to tell you, that you over-strain’d matters a little, when you liken’d me to _Ovid_, as to our wit and manner of versification. Why, Sir, says Mr. _Dryden_, I maintain it, and who then dares be so saucy as to oppose me? But under favour, Sir, cries the other, I think I should know _Ovid_ pretty well, having now convers’d with him almost three hundred years, and the devil’s in it if I don’t know my own talent, and therefore tho’ you pass a mighty compliment upon me in drawing this parallel between us, yet I tell you there is no more resemblance between us, as to our manner of writing, than there is between a jolly well-complexion’d _Englishman_ and a black-hair’d thin-gutted _Italian_. Lord, Sir, says _Dryden_ to him, I tell you that you’re mistaken, and your two styles are as like one another as two Exchequer tallies. But I, who should know it better, says _Chaucer_, tell you the contrary. And I, say Mr. _Bays_, who know these things better than you, and all the men in the world, will stand by what I have affirm’d, and upon that gave him the lye. _Rhadamanthus_, who is one of _Pluto_’s oldest judges and a severe regulator of good manners and conversation, immediately sent for our friend _John_ to appear in court; and after he had severely reprimanded him for using such insufferable language upon no provocation; for your punishment, says he, I command you to get Sir _Richard Blackmore_’s translation of _Job_ by heart, and to repeat ten pages of it to our friend the author of the _Rehearsal_ every morning. Poor _Bays_ desired his lordship to mitigate so rash a sentence, and by way of commutation frankly offer’d to drink so many quarts of liquid sulphur every morning. No, says my lord judge, tho’ they commute penances in _Doctors-Commons_, yet we are not such rogues to commute them in hell, and so I expect to be obey’d.