Note 44 — JANUARY AND MAY:
Reading edition
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.