the scant water of a rill. In this book let nothing be made vulgar (plebescat) with ribaldry, nor let anything be open to biting reproof, as if it smacked of the coarseness of the moderns [to whom does he refer?]; but let the flower of my talent be presented, and the dignity of diligence; for pigmy humility, thus raised upon a height, may overtop the giant. Let not those dare to tire of this work, who are squalling in the cradles of elementary instruction, sucking milk from nurses' paps; nor let those seek to cry it down, who are pledged to the service of the higher learning; nor those presume to discredit it, who strike heaven from the top-notch of philosophy. For in this work, the sweetness of the literal meaning will tickle the puerile ear; moral teaching will instruct the more proficient understanding; and the finer subtilty of allegory will sharpen the finished intellect. Wherefore let all those be kept from ingress who, abandoned to the mirrors of the senses, are not charioteered by reason, and, pursuing the sense-image, have no appetite for reason's truth,—lest indeed what is holy be defiled by dogs, and the pearl be trampled by the feet of swine. But such as will not suffer the things of reason to rest with the base images, and dare to lift their view to forms divine, may thread the narrow passes of my book, while they weigh with discretion's scales what is suited to the common ear, and what should be buried in silence."
This Preface of strained sentence and laboured metaphor, of forced humility and overweening self-consciousness, hardly augurs well for the poem of which it is the prelude. But prefaces are authors' pitfalls, and, moreover, many writers have floundered in one medium of speech while in another they have moved with ease. From the ungainly prose of the Persones Tale, no one would expect the ease and force of Chaucer's verse. And the reader of Alanus's Preface need not be discouraged from entering upon his poem. Its subject is man; its philosophic or religious purpose is to expound the functions of God, of Nature, of Fortune, of Virtue and Vice, in making man and shaping his career. The poem is an allegory, original in its general scheme of composition, but in many of its parts following earlier allegorical writings.
The opening lines tell of Nature's solicitude to bestow her gifts so that the finished work may present a fair harmony: as a patient workman she forges, trims and files, and fashions with reason's chisel. But when she seeks to invest her work with qualities beyond her giving, she is
