and generosity have called him. The latter part of my poem, which describes the fire, I owe, first, to the piety and fatherly affection of our Monarch to his suffering subjects; and, in the second place, to the courage, loyalty, and magnanimity 5 of the City; both which were so conspicuous that I have wanted words to celebrate them as they deserve. I have called my poem historical, not epic, though both the actions and actors are as much heroic as any poem can contain. But since the action is not properly one, nor that accomIo plished in the last successes, I have judged it too bold a title for a few stanzas, which are little more in number than a single Iliad or the longest of the Æneids. For this reason (I mean not of length, but broken action, tied too severely to the laws of history) I am apt to agree with those who , 15 rank Lucan rather among historians in verse than epic poets; in whose room, if I am not deceived, Silius Italicus, though a worse writer, may more justly be admitted. I have chosen to write my poem in quatrains or stanzas of four in alternate rhyme, because I have ever judged them more noble and of 20 greater dignity both for the sound and number than any other verse in use amongst us; in which I am sure I have your approbation. The learned languages have certainly a great advantage of us in not being tied to the slavery of any rhyme, and were less constrained in the quantity of 25 every syllable, which they might vary with spondees or dactyls, besides so many other helps of grammatical figures for the lengthening or abbreviation of them, than the modern are in the close of that one syllable, which often confines, and more often corrupts, the sense of all the rest. But in 38 this necessity of our rhymes, I have always found the couplet verse most easy (though not so proper for this occasion), for there the work is sooner at an end, every two lines concluding the labour of the poet; but in quatrains he is to carry it farther on, and not only so, but to bear along in his 35 head the troublesome sense of four lines together. For ⚫ those who write correctly in this kind must needs acknowledge that the last line of the stanza is to be considered in the composition of the first. Neither can we give ourselves

'the liberty of making any part of a verse for the sake of
rhyme, or concluding with a word which is not current
English, or using the variety of female rhymes; all which
our fathers practised. And for the female rhymes, they are
still in use amongst other nations: with the Italian in every 5
line, with the Spaniard promiscuously, with the French al-
ternately, as those who have read the Alaric, the Pucelle, or
any of their latter poems, will agree with me. And besides
this, they write in Alexandrines or verses of six feet, such
as, amongst us, is the old translation of Homer by Chapman; 10
all which by lengthening of their chain makes the sphere
of their activity the larger. I have dwelt too long upon
the choice of my stanza, which you may remember is much
better defended in the Preface to Gondibert; and therefore
I will hasten to acquaint you with my endeavours in the 15
writing. In general I will only say I have never yet seen
the description of any naval fight in the proper terms which
are used at sea; and if there be any such in another language,
as that of Lucan in the third of his Pharsalia, yet I could
not prevail myself of it in the English; the terms of arts 20
in every tongue bearing more of the idiom of it than any
other words. We hear, indeed, among our poets, of the
thundering of guns, the smoke, the disorder and the slaughter;
but all these are common notions. And certainly as those
who in a logical dispute keep in general terms would hide 25
a fallacy, so those who do it in any poetical description would
veil their ignorance.

'Descriptas servare vices operumque colores
Cur ego, si nequeo ignoroque, poeta salutor?'

For my own part, if I had little knowledge of the sea, yet 30
I have thought it no shame to learn; and if I have made
some few mistakes, it is only, as you can bear me witness,
because I have wanted opportunity to correct them, the
whole poem being first written, and now sent you from
a place where I have not so much as the converse of any 35
seaman. Yet though the trouble I had in writing it was
great, it was more than recompensed by the pleasure; I

found myself so warm in celebrating the praises of military men, two such especially as the Prince and General, that it is no wonder if they inspired me with thoughts above my ordinary level. And I am well satisfied, that as they 5 are incomparably the best subject I have ever had, excepting only the royal family, so also that this I have written of them is much better than what I have performed on any other. I have been forced to help out other arguments; but this has been bountiful to me: they have been low and barren 10 of praise, and I have exalted them and made them fruitful; but here-Omnia sponte sua reddit justissima tellus. I have had a large, a fair, and a pleasant field; so fertile, that, without my cultivating, it has given me two harvests in a summer, and in both oppressed the reaper. All other greatness in subjects is 15 only counterfeit, it will not endure the test of danger; the greatness of arms is only real. Other greatness burdens a nation with its weight; this supports it with its strength. And as it is the happiness of the age, so is it the peculiar goodness of the best of kings, that we may praise his subjects 20 without offending him. Doubtless it proceeds from a just confidence of his own virtue, which the lustre of no other can be so great as to darken in him; for the good or the valiant are never safely praised under a bad or a degenerate prince. But to return from this digression to a farther 25 account of my poem: I must crave leave to tell you, that, as I have endeavoured to adorn it with noble thoughts, so much more to express those thoughts with elocution. The ⚫ composition of all poems is or ought to be of wit; and wit in the poet, or wit-writing (if you will give me leave to use a 30 school-distinction), is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer; which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after: or, without metaphor, which searches over all the memory for the species or ideas of those things which 35 it designs to represent. Wit written is that which is well defined the happy result of thought, or product of that imagination. But to proceed from wit in the general notion of it to the proper wit of an heroic or historical poem, I judge

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it chiefly to consist in the delightful imaging of persons, actions, passions, or things. 'Tis not the jerk or sting of an epigram, nor the seeming contradiction of a poor antithesis (the delight of an ill-judging audience in a play of rhyme), nor the jingle of a more poor paronomasia; neither is it so much 5 the morality of a grave sentence, affected by Lucan, but more sparingly used by Virgil; but it is some lively and apt description, dressed in such colours of speech, that it sets before your eyes the absent object as perfectly and more delightfully than nature. So then the first happiness of the 10 poet's imagination is properly invention, or finding of the thought; the second is fancy, or the variation, driving, or moulding of that thought as the judgment represents it . proper to the subject; the third is elocution, or the art of clothing and adorning that thought so found and varied, in 15 apt, significant, and sounding words. The quickness of the imagination is seen in the invention, the fertility in the fancy, and the accuracy in the expression. For the two first of these Ovid is famous amongst the poets; for the latter, Virgil. Ovid images more often the movements and 20 affections of the mind, either combating between two contrary passions, or extremely discomposed by one; his words, therefore, are the least part of his care; for he pictures nature in disorder, with which the study and choice of words is inconsistent. This is the proper wit of dialogue or discourse, 25 and consequently of the drama, where all that is said is to be supposed the effect of suddden thought; which, though it excludes not the quickness of wit in repartees, yet admits not a too curious election of words, too frequent allusions or use of tropes, or in fine anything that shows remoteness 30 of thought or labour in the writer. On the other side, Virgil speaks not so often to us in the person of another, like Ovid, but in his own: he relates almost all things as from himself, and thereby gains more liberty than the other to express his thoughts with all the graces of elocution, to write more 35 figuratively, and to confess as well the labour as the force of his imagination. Though he describes his Dido well and naturally, in the violence of her passions, yet he must yield

in that to the Myrrha, the Byblis, the Althæa of Ovid. For as great an admirer of him as I am, I must acknowledge that, if I see not more of their souls than I see of Dido's, at least I have a greater concernment for them: and that con5.vinces me that Ovid has touched those tender strokes more

delicately than Virgil could. But when action or persons are to be described, when any such image is to be set before us, how bold, how masterly are the strokes of Virgil! We see the objects he represents us within their native figures, in 10 their proper motions; but we so see them as our own eyes could never have beheld them, so beautiful in themselves. We see the soul of the poet, like that universal one of which he speaks, informing and moving through all his pictures:

15

20

'Totamque infusa per artus

Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet.'

We behold him embellishing his images, as he makes Venus breathing beauty upon her son Æneas:

'Lumenque juventæ

Purpureum et lætos oculis afflarat honores:
Quale manus addunt ebori decus, aut ubi flavo
Argentum Pariusve lapis circumdatur auro.'

See his Tempest, his Funeral Sports, his Combat of Turnus and Æneas, and in his Georgics, which I esteem the divinest part of all his writings, the Plague, the Country, the Battle 25 of Bulls, the Labour of the Bees, and those many other excellent images of nature, most of which are neither great in themselves nor have any natural ornament to bear them up; but the words wherewith he describes them are so excellent, that it might be well applied to him which was .30 said by Ovid, Materiam superabat opus: the very sound of his words has often somewhat that is connatural to the subject; and while we read him, we sit, as in a play, beholding the scenes of what he represents. To perform this, he made frequent use of tropes, which you know change the 35 nature of a known word by applying it to some other signi