All this sounds ridiculous enough. But even genius was bitten by the same tarantula. We all know how Johnson treated Lycidas. Dryden found the rhyme in Milton’s juvenile poems “strained and forced” (this of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, for example!), and confessed that Shakspere’s diction was almost as difficult to him as Chaucer. How difficult Chaucer was much nearer his own time may be inferred from the leonine Latin version of the Troilus and Cresscide which Francis Kinaston, an Oxford scholar, published in 1635, with the avowed object of rescuing Chaucer “from the neglect to which his obsolete language had condemned him by rendering him generally intelligible.” And Cartwright, “the florid and seraphicall preacher,” approves his pious labor, telling him:
“‘Tis to your happy cares we owe that we
Read Chaucer now without a dictionary.”
What a commentary on the educational system of the time that in England such English as this—
“This Troilus, as he was wont to guide
His yonge knights, he lad hem up and doune
In thilke large temple, on every side
Beholding aie the ladies of the toune,”
should be less generally intelligible than such Latin as this:
“Hic Troilus pro more (ut solebat)