"Tanti est ut placeam tibi, perire *."

Having been forced, for my own necessary justification, to trouble the reader with this long discourse of the reasons why I trouble him also with all the rest of the book; I shall only add somewhat concerning the several parts of it, and some other pieces, which I have thought fit to reject in this publication: as, first, all those which I wrote at school, from the age of ten years, till after fifteen; for even so far backward there remain yet some traces of me in the little footsteps of a child; which, though they were then looked upon as commendable extravagancies in a boy (men setting a value upon any kind of fruit before the usual season of it), yet I would be loth to be bound now to read them all over myself; and therefore should do ill to expect that patience from others. Besides, they have already passed through several editions, which is a longer life than uses to be enjoyed by infants that are born before the ordinary terms. They had the good fortune then to find the world so indulgent (for, considering the time of their production, who could be so hard-hearted to be severe ?) that I scarce yet apprehend so much to be censured for them, as for not having made advances afterwards proportionable to the speed of my setting out; and am obliged too in a manner by discretion to conceal and suppress them, as promises and instru

* Martial. lib. viii. ep. 69.

ments under my own hand, whereby I stood engaged for more than I have been able to perform; in which truly if I have failed, I have the real excuse of the honestest sort of bankrupts, which is, to have been made unsolvable not so much by their own negligence and ill-husbandry, as by some notorious accidents and public disasters. In the next place, I have cast away all such pieces as I wrote during the time of the late troubles, with any relation to the differences that caused them; as, among others, three books of the civil war itself, reaching as far as the first battle of Newbury, where the succeeding misfortunes of the party stopped the work.

As for the ensuing book, it consists of four parts. The first is a Miscellany of several subjects, and some of them made when I was very young, which it is perhaps superfluous to tell the reader: I know not by what chance I have kept copies of them; for they are but a very few in comparison of those which I have lost; and I think they have no extraordinary virtue in them, to deserve more care in preservation than was bestowed upon their brethren; for which I am so little concerned, that I am ashamed of the arrogancy of the word, when I said I had lost them.

"Love

The second is called "The Mistress," or "Verses;" for so it is, that poets are scarce thought

freemen of their company, without paying some duties, and obliging themselves to be true to love. Sooner or later they must all pass through that trial, like some Mahometan monks, that are bound by their order, once at least in their life, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca:

"In furias ignemque ruunt: amor omnibus idem *."

But we must not always make a judgment of their manners from their writings of this kind; as the Romanists uncharitably do of Beza, for a few lascivious sonnets composed by him in his youth. It is not in this sense that poesy is said to be a kind of painting; it is not the picture of the poet, but of things and persons imagined by him. He may be in his own practice and disposition a philosopher, nay a Stoic, and yet speak sometimes with the softness of an amorous Sappho,

He professes too much the use of fables (though without the malice of deceiving) to have his testimony taken even against himself. Neither would I here be misunderstood, as if I affected so much gravity as to

Virg. Georg. iii. 244.

Virg. Ecl. iii. 89.

be ashamed to be thought really in love. On the contrary, I cannot have a good opinion of any man, who is not at least capable of being so. But I speak it to excuse some expressions (if such there be) which may happen to offend the severity of supercilious readers: for much excess is to be allowed in love, and even more in poetry; so we avoid the two unpardonable vices in both, which are obscenity and profaneness, of which, I am sure, if my words be ever guilty, they have ill represented my thoughts and intentions. And if, notwithstanding all this, the lightness of the matter here displease any body, he may find wherewithal to content his more serious inclinations in the weight and height of the ensuing arguments.

For, as for the "Pindarick Odes," (which is the third part,) I am in great doubt whether they will be understood by most readers; nay, even by very many who are well enough acquainted with the common roads and ordinary tracks of poesy. They either are, or at least were meant to be, of that kind of style which Dion. Halicarnasseus calls Milanoquis nai ndù μerà duvótntos, and which he attributes to Alcæus. The digressions are many, and sudden, and sometimes long, according to the fashion of all lyriques, and of Pindar above all men living: the figures are unusual and bold, even to temerity, and such as I durst not have to do withal in any other kind of poetry: the

numbers are various and irregular, and sometimes (especially some of the long ones) seem harsh and uncouth, if the just measures and cadences be not observed in the pronunciation. So that almost all their sweetness and numerosity (which is to be found, if I mistake not, in the roughest, if rightly repeated) lies in a manner wholly at the mercy of the reader. I have briefly described the nature of these verses, in the Ode intituled "The Resurrection:" and though the liberty of them may incline a man to believe them easy to be composed, yet the undertaker will find it otherwise

"-Ut sibi quivis

Speret idem; sudet multùm, frustráque laboret "Ausus idem*."

I come now to the last part, which is " Davideis," or an heroical poem of the troubles of David: which I designed into twelve books; not for the tribes' sake, but after the pattern of our master Virgil; and intended to close all with that most poetical and excellent elegy of David on the death of Saul and Jonathan : for I had no mind to carry him quite on to his anointing at Hebron, because it is the custom of heroic poets (as we see by the examples of Homer and Virgil, whom we should do ill to forsake to imitate others)

*Hor. Ars, Poet. 240.