[Of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:] Here is God’s plenty.

Dryden’s remark is associated with his late-career engagement with Chaucer, especially in the 1690s when he produced modernized versions of several Chaucerian tales. In the preface to his Chaucer translations, Dryden praises Chaucer’s range of characters, tones, and narrative materials—comic, serious, courtly, and earthy—found in The Canterbury Tales. The phrase “God’s plenty” captures Dryden’s sense that Chaucer offers an abundant, various feast of human life and language, and it helped shape later critical commonplaces about Chaucer’s capaciousness and inclusiveness as a national poet.

“Here is God’s plenty” is an exclamation of abundance: Chaucer’s Tales contain a profusion of stories, voices, social types, and moral registers. Dryden implies that Chaucer’s art is not narrow or fastidious but richly various—like a table spread with more than enough for every appetite. The phrase also carries a theological overtone: the variety of human experience represented in the Tales is part of a divinely sanctioned plenitude, not merely vulgar excess. In criticism, the line has become shorthand for Chaucer’s encyclopedic breadth and for the Tales’ capacity to accommodate contradiction—piety and bawdry, idealism and satire—without collapsing into a single viewpoint.