The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature; and, more recently, not only Pope[554] and Dryden[555] have been beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower.[556] Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgat[557] and Caxton,[558] from Guido di Colonna,[559] whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius,[560] Ovid,[561] and Statius.[562] Then Petrarch,[563] Boccaccio,[564] and the Provencal poets,[565] and his benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose[566] is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meung: Troilus and Creseide,[567] from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox,[568] from the _Lais_ of Marie: The House of Fame,[569] from the French or

Place: ¶363
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The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature; a… — Essays