Note 547 — INTERCHAPTER V.

Dryden and Fontenelle themselves are of course not quite sinless. The latter (v. infra, p. 505) proposes emendations in the magnificent couplet which he cites from Saint-Louis; and Dryden, let us say, does not improve Shakespeare and Chaucer. But it was on Shakespeare and Chaucer as they were, not as he travestied them for popular use, that Dryden passed the immortal eulogies; and Fontenelle thought that the couplet even as it stood “might easily not have been found by distinguished poets,” which is from him equivalent to a blare of superlatives from our modern critics.