"His versification is so destitute of sustained harmony, many of his thoughts are so strained, his sentiments so unamiable, his misanthropy so gloomy, his libertinism so shameless, his merriment such a grinning of a ghastly smile, that I have always believed his verses would soon rank with forgotten things."
John Quincy Adams, Memoirs
Chaucer Review, 1835
"Chaucer, not withstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible: he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity, which does not deserve so well as Piers Plowman or Thomas Erceldoune."
John Byron, The Works of Lord Byron
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