of this comedy. It succeeded ill in the representation, against the opinion of many the best judges of our age, to whom you know I read it ere it was presented publickly. Whether the fault was in the play itself, or in the lameness of the action, or in the number of its enemies, who came resolved to damn it for the title, I will not now dispute; that would be too like the little satisfaction which an unlucky gamester finds in the relation of every cast by which he came to lose his money. I have had formerly so much success, that the miscarriage of this play was only my giving Fortune her revenge; I owed it her; and she was indulgent, that she exacted not the payment long before. I will therefore deal more reasonably with you, than any poet has ever done with any patron; I do not so much as oblige you, for my sake, to pass two ill hours in reading of my play. Think, if you please, that this Dedication is only an occasion I have taken to do myself the greatest honour imaginable with posterity; that is, to be recorded in the number of those men whom you have favoured with your friendship and esteem; for I am well assured, that besides the present satisfaction I have, it will gain me the greatest part of my reputation with afterages, when they shall find me valuing myself on your kindness to me. I may have reason to suspect my own credit with them, but I have none to doubt of your's; and they who perhaps would forget me in my poems, would remember me in this epistle.

This was the course which has formerly been

practised by the poets of that nation who were masters of the universe. Horace and Ovid, who had little reason to distrust their immortality, yet took occasion to speak with honour of Virgil, Varius, Tibullus, and Propertius, their contemporaries; as if they sought, in the testimony of their friendship, a farther evidence of their fame. For my own part, I who am the least amongst the poets, have yet the fortune to be honoured with the best patron, and the best friend; for, (to omit some great persons of our court, to whom I am many ways obliged, and who have taken care of me, even amidst the exigencies of a war,) I can make my boast to have found a better Mæcenas

6

in the person of my Lord Treasurer Clifford, and

a more elegant Tibullus in that of Sir Charles Sedley. I have chosen that poet to whom I would resemble you, not only because I think him at least equal, if not superior to Ovid in his elegies; nor because of his quality, for he was, you know, a Roman knight, as well as Ovid; but for his candour, his wealth, his way of living, and particularly because of this testimony which is given him by Horace, which I have a thousand times in my mind applied to you:

Non tu corpus eras sine pectore: Dii tibi formam,
Dii tibi divitias dederant, artemq; fruendi.
Quid voveat dulci nutricula majus alumno
Quam sapere, et fari possit quæ sentiat, et cui
Gratia, forma, valetudo contingat abunde;
Et mundus victus, non deficiente crumena ?

6 The second Dutch war.

Certainly the poets of that age enjoyed much happiness in the conversation and friendship of one another. They imitated the best way of living, which was to pursue innocent and inoffensive pleasure; that which one of the ancients called-eruditam voluptatem. We have, like them, our genial nights, where our discourse is neither too serious nor too light, but always pleasant, and for the most part instructive; the raillery neither too sharp upon the present, nor too censorious on the absent, and the cups only such as will raise the conversation of the night, without disturbing the business of the morrow. And thus far not only the philosophers, but the fathers of the church have gone, without lessening their reputation of good manners or of piety. For this reason I have often laughed at the ignorant and ridiculous descriptions which some pedants have given of the Wits, as they are pleased to call them; which are a generation of men as unknown to them as the people of Tartary or the Terra Australis are to us. And therefore, as we draw giants and Anthropophagi in those vacancies of our maps, where we have not travelled to discover better, so those wretches paint lewdness, atheism, folly, ill-reasoning, and all manner of extravagancies amongst us, for want of understanding what we are. Oftentimes it so falls out, that they have a particular picque to some one amongst us, and then they immediately interest heaven in their quarrel; as it is an usual trick in courts, when one designs the ruin of his enemy, to disguise his malice with

some concernment of the King's, and to revenge his own cause with pretence of vindicating the honour of his master. Such Wits as they describe I have never been so unfortunate to meet in your company; but have often heard much better reasoning at your table, than I have encountered in their books. The Wits they describe are the fops we banish; for blasphemy and atheism, if they were neither sin nor ill manners, are subjects so very common, and worn so threadbare, that people who have sense avoid them, for fear of being suspected to have none. It calls the good name of their wit in question, as it does the credit of a citizen, when his shop is filled with trumperies and painted titles, instead of wares; we conclude them bankrupt to all manner of understanding, and that to use blasphemy is a kind of applying pigeons to the soles of the feet; it proclaims their fancy as well as judgment to be in a desperate condition. I am sure, for your own particular, if any of these judges had once the happiness to converse with you,-to hear the candour of your opinions, how freely you commend that wit in others, of which you have so large a portion yourself,-how unapt you are to be censorious,—with how much easiness you speak so many things, and those so pointed, that no other man is able to excel, or perhaps to reach by study,—they would, instead of your accusers, become your proselytes. They would reverence so much good sense and so much good nature in the same person; and

come, like the satyr, to warm themselves at that fire, of which they were ignorantly afraid, when they stood at distance. But you have too great a reputation to be wholly free from censure: it is a fine which Fortune sets upon all extraordinary persons, and from which you should not wish to be delivered till you are dead. I have been used by my criticks much more severely, and have more reason to complain, because I am deeper taxed for less estate. I am ridiculously enough accused to be a contemner of Universities, that is, in other words, an enemy of learning, without the foundation of which I am sure no man can pretend to be a poet; and if this be not enough, I am made a detractor from my predecessors,' whom I confess to have been my masters in the art; but this latter was the accusation of the best judge, and almost the best poet in the Latin tongue. You find Horace complaining, that for taxing some verses in Lucilius, he himself was blamed by others, though his design was no other than mine now, to improve the knowledge of poetry; and it was no defence to him, amongst his enemies, any more than it is for me, that he praised Lucilius where he deserved it; pagina laudatur eâdem. It is for this reason I will be no more mistaken for my good meaning: I know I honour Ben Jonson more than my little criticks, because without vanity

In the Epilogue to the Second Part of THE CONQUEST OF GRANADA.