[43] Addison's Letter from Italy:
My humbler verse demands a softer theme,
A painted meadow, or a purling stream.
[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.
[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.
[46] Dryden's Palamon and Arcite:
Nor art, nor nature's band can ease my grief,
Nothing but death, the wretch's last relief.
[47] There is a natural trait in the original which is not preserved by Pope. The knight weeps piteously at his sudden calamity: