o chara ante alias, magnorum nomine regum Digna domus ! Trini nomine digna Dei! O nimium Cereris cumulati munere campi, Pofthabitis Ennæ quos colit illa jugis ! Quas recreant avium Pieridúmque chori ! Amnibus auriferis invidiofus inops ! Detque Deus docta poffe quiete frui ! Vidifti in ripa, Came ferene, tuâ ; Ille quidem immerito, fed tibi gratus erat. Nam, memini ripâ cum tu dignatus utrâque, Dignatum est totum verba referre nemus. Tunc liquidis tacitifque fimul mea vita diebus, Et fimilis veftræ candida Auxit aquæ. At nunc cænofæ luces, atque obice multo Rumpitur ætatis turbidus ordo mex. Quid mihi Sequanâ opus, Tamesisve aut Thybridis unda? Tu potis es noftram tollere, Came, îitim. Felix, qui nunquam plus uno viderit amne! Quique eadem Salicis littora more colit ! Felix, qui non tentatus fordescere muodus, Et cui pauperies nota nitere potest! Ut res huinanas fentiat eile nihil! Et documentorum fatque supérque dedit. Contulásque hominum forte minante minas, Et versas fundo vidimus orbis opes. Infami scopulis naufragiisque mari ? (Nec frustra) atque ædes contremuêre tuæ : Contremuêre ipfæ pacátæ Palladis arces; Et timuit fulmen laurea sancta novum. Nec saltem bellis ifta licere, velit! In nos jus habeat : jus habet omne malum. Fundes; nec tibi mors ipfa fuperftes erit : Formosas mittes ad mare mortis aquas. (Namque folent ipfis bella nocere Deis) Imploravit opem fuperûm, questúfque cievit, Tinxit adorandus candida membra cruor. Quid quereris? contemne breves secura dolores : Nam tibi ferre necem vulnera nulla valent. THE AUTHOR'S PRE FACE TO HIS EDITION IN folio, 1656. A a T my return lately into England *, I met by great accident (for such I account it to be, that any copy of it should be extant any where so long, unless at his house who printed it) a book intituled, “ The Iron Age," and published under my dame, during the time of my absence. I wondered very much how one who could be lo foolish to write so ill verses, should yet be so wise to set them forth ás another man's rather than his own; though perhaps he might have made a better choice, and not fatliered the bastard upon such a person, whole stock of reputation is, I fear, little enough for maintenance of his own numerous legitimate offspring of, that kind. It would have been much less injurious, if it had pleased the author to put forth some of my writings. under his own name, rather than his own under mine: he had been in that a more pardonable plagiary, and had done lefs wrong by robbery, than he does by such a bounty; for nobody can be juttiged by the imputation even of another's merit; and our own coarse cloaths are like to become us better than those of another man, though never 1o rich: but these, to say the truth, were so beggarly, that I'myself was ashamed to wear them. It was in vain for me, that I avoided censure by the concealment of my own writings, if my reputation could be thus executed in effigie; and impossible it is for any good name to be in safety, if the malice of witches have the power to consume and destroy it in an image of their own making. This indeed was so ill made, and so unlike, that I hope the charm took no effect. So that I esteem myself less prejuidiced by it, than by that which has been done to me lince, almost in the same kind, which is, the publication of some things of mine without my consent or kriowledge, and those só mangled and imperfect, that I could neither with honour acknowledge, nor with honesty quite disavow them. Of which fort, was a comedy called The Guardian," printed in the year 1650; but made and acted before the Prince, in his passage through Cambridge towards York, at the beginning of the late unhappy war; or rather neither made nor acted, but roughdrawn only, and repeated ; før the halte was fo great, that it could neither be revised or perfected by the author, nor learned without book by the actors, nor set forth in any measure tolerably by the officers of the college. After the representation (which, I confess, was somewhat of the latest) I began to look it over, and changed it very much, ftriking out some whole parts, as that of the poet and the soldier ; but I have lost the copy, and dare not think it deserves the pains to write it again, which makes me omit it in this publication, though there be some things in it which I am not ashamed of, taking the excuse of my age and small experience in human conversation when I made it. But, as it is, it is only the hasty first fitting of a picture, and therefore like to resemble me accordingly. From this which has happened to myself, I began to reflect on the fortune of almost all writers, and especially poets, whose works (commonly printed after their deaths) we find stuffed out, either with counterfeit pieces, like false money put in to fill up the bag, though it add nothing to the sum; or with such; which, though of their own coin, they would have called in themselves, for the baseness of the allay: whether this proceed from the indiscretion of their friends, who think a vast heap of stones or rubbish a bétter monument than a little tomb of marble; or by the unworthy avarice of some stationers; who are content to diminish the value of the author, so they may increase the price of the book ; and, like vintners, with fophisticate mixtures, spoil the whole velict of wine, • In 1656. VOL. II. А may to make it yield more prost. This has been the case with Shakespeare, Fletcher, Jonson, and many others; part of whose poems I should take the boldness to prune and lop away, if the care of replanting them in print did belong to me: neither would I make any scruple to cut off from some the unnecessary young suckers, and from others the oid withered branches; for a great wit'is no more tied to live in a vast volume, than in a gigantic body; on the contrary, it is commonly more vigorous, the less space it animates. And, as Statius says of little Tydeus *, Totos infusa per artus * Major in exiguo regnabat corpore virtus." I am not igncrant, that, by faying this of others, I expose myself to some raillery, for not using the same fevere discretion in my own case, where it concerns me nearer: but though I publish here more than in strict wisdom I ought to have done, yet I have fupprest and cast away more than I publish ; and, for the ease of myself and others, have lost, I believe too, more than both. And upon these considerations 1 have been persuaded to overcome all the jutt repugnances of my own modefty, and to produce ibese poems to the light and view of the world; not as a thing that I approved of in itself, but as a less evil, which I chose rather than to stay till it were done for me by somebody elfe, either furreptitiously before, or avowedly after, my death: and this will be the more excusable, when the reader shall know in what respects be look upon me as a dead, or at least a dying person, and upon my Muse in this action, as appearing, like the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and affitting at her own funeral. For, to make myself absolutely dead in a poetical capacity, my resolution at present is, never to exercise any more that faculty. It is, I confess, but seldom seen that the poet dies before the man ; for, when we once fall in love with that bewitching art, we do not use to court it as a mistress, but marry it as a wife, and take it for better or worse, as an inseparable companion of our whole life. But as the marriages of infants do but rarely prosper, so no man ought to wonder at the diminutioh or decay of my affection to poesy; to which I had contracted myself so much under age, and so much to my own prejudice in regard of those more profitable matches, which I might have made among the richer sciences. As for the portion which this brings of fame, it is an estate (if it be any, for men are not oftener deceived in their hopes of widows, than in their opinion of, “ Exegi monumentum ære perennius”) that hardly ever comes in whilst we are living to enjoy it, but is a fantastical kind of reversion to our own felves: neither ought any man to envy poets this pofthumous and imaginary happiness, since they find commonly so little in present, that it may be truly applied to them, which St. Paul speaks of the first Christians, “ If their reward be in this life, they are “ of all meo the most miferable.” And, if in quiet and flourithing times they meet with so small encouragement, what are they to expect in rough and troubled ones? If wit be such a plant, that it scarce receives heat enough to preserve it alive even in the summer of our cold climate, how can it choose but wither in a long and a sharp winter? A warlike, various, and a tragical age is best to write of, but worst to write in. And I may, though in a very unequal proportion, assume that to myself, which was spoken by Tully to a much better person, upon occafion of the civil wars and revolutions in his time: “ Sed in te intuens, - Brute, doieo: cujus in adolescentiam, per medias laudes, quadrigis vehentem, trans36 versa incurrit misera fortuna reipublicæt.” Neither is the present constitution of my mind more proper than that of the times for this exercise, or rather divertisment. There is nothing that requires so much serenity and cheerfulness of spirit; it must not be either overwhelmed with the cares of life, or overcaft with the clouds of melancholy and sorrow, or Thaken and disturbed by the itorms of injurious fortune ; it must, like the halcyon, have fair weather to breed in. The soul must be filled with bright and delightful ideas, when it undertakes to communicate delight to others ; which is the main end of poesy. One may see through a a the style of Ovid de Trist. the humbled and dejected condition of spirit with which he wrote it ; there scarce remains any footstep of that genius, “ —quem nec Jovis ira, nec ignes *, &c.” “ In vultu color eft fine sanguine: lumina mæltis “ Flet tamen- " Quisquis erat vitae, fcribam, color." I shall rather use his words in another place | « Vixi Camenis nuper idoneus, “ Barbiton hic paries habebit." “ Impiger extremos currit mercator ad Indos, “ Per mare pauperiem fugiens----$)" but to forsake this world for ever, with all the vanities änd vexations of it, and to bury myself there in some obscure retreat (but not without the consolation of letters and philosophy) Oblitüsque meorum, obliviscendus & illis" as my former author speaks too, who has enticed me here, I know not how, into the pedantry of this heap of Latin sentences. And I think Dr. Donne's Sundyal in a grave is not more useless and ridiculous, than poetry would be in that retirement. As this therefore is in a true sense a kind of death to the Muses, and a real literal quitting of this world; so, methink3, I may make a jult claim to the undousted privilege of deceafed poets, which is, to be read with more favour than the living; “ Tanti est ut placcam tibi, perire **.” Having been forced, for my own neceffary 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 hall only add somewhat concerning the several parts of it, and some other pieces, which I have thought fit to reject in this publication: as, firit, all those which I wrote at school, from the age of ten years, till after fifteen ; for even so far backward there Temain 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 all to expect that patience from others. Besides, they have already past through several editions, which is Metam. 1. xv. 871. + Metam. I. vi. 304. Hor. 2 Sat, i. 60. ll! 3 Carm. Ode xxvi. “ Vir puellis," &c. $ Hor, 1 Ep. i. 45. Hor. 1 Ep.xi.9. * Martial. lib viii. ep. 69. 1 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 fevere?) that I scarce yet apprehend so much to be censured for them, as for not having made advances afterwards propo:tionable to the speed of my setting out; and am obliged too in a manner by discretion to conceal and suppress them, as promises and instruments 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 caft 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 stopt 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 fuperfluous 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 loft ; 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 alhamed of the arrogancy of the word, when I said I had lost them. The second, is called, “ The Millress,” or “ Love-Verses ;" for so it is, that poets are scarce thought freemen of their company, without paying fome 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 leait in their life, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca ; “ In furias ignemque ruunt: amor omnibus idem t." But we must not always make a judgment of their manners from their writings of this kind; as the Romanilts uncharitably do of Beza, for a few lascivious sonnets composed by him in his youth. It is not in this sense that poefy is faid 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 difpofition a philosopher, nay, a Stoic, and yet fpeak sometimes with the softness of an amorous Sappho, “ - ferat & rubus asper amomum. 1" 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 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 be. I ing so." But I speak it to excuse fome 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; fo 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 “ Pindaric Odes” (which is the third part), I am in great doubt whether they will be understood by mott readers; nay, even by very many who are well enough acquainted with the common roads and ordinary tracts of poely. They either are, or at least were meant to be, of that kind of style which Dion. Halicarnasseus calls Miladaqués xai indi Hità deurbontos, and which he attributes to Alceus. The digressions are many, and sudden, and sometimes long, according to the fashion of . In the present collection, there are five parts; the first of which contains the juvenile Pozma mertiorel in p. vii. Their hitory may be seen in the prefaces prefixed to them. t. Virg. Georg. iii. 24%. Virg. Ecl. iii. 89. |
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