DEDICATION OF THE THIRD PART OF POETICAL MISCELLANIES." TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE MY LORD, THESE Miscellany Poems are by many titles yours. The first they claim, from your acceptance of my promise to present them to you, before some of them were yet in being. The rest are derived from your own merit, the exactness of your judgment in poetry, and the candour of your nature, easy to forgive some trivial faults, when they come accompanied with countervailing beauties. But after all, though these are your equi 5 This collection was published in octavo in 1693, arvestered July "Weassen. the father the March 1687-d (in consequence of 1 table claims to a dedication from other poets, yet I must acknowledge a bribe in the case, which is your particular liking of my verses. It is a vanity common to all writers, to overvalue their own productions; and it is better for me to own this failing in myself, than the world to do it for me. For what other reason have I spent my life in so unprofitable a study? Why am I grown old in seeking so barren a reward as fame? The same parts and application which have made me a poet, might have raised me to any honours of the gown; which are often given to men of as little learning and less honesty than myself. No government has ever been, or ever can be, wherein timeservers and blockheads will not be uppermost. The persons are only changed, but the same jugglings in state, the same hypocrisy in religion, the same self-interest and mismanagement will remain for ever. Blood and money will be lavished in all ages, only for the preferment of new faces with old consciences. There is too Her mother was Mary Davies, who was an actress in the Duke of York's Company in 1664, and according to Downes, the prompter, had been bred up in Lady D'Avenant's house. She is said to have gained the King's heart by singing several wild mad songs, in D'Avenant's RIVALS, 1668, altered from Fletcher's Two NOBLE KINSMEN, particularly that beginning with the wordsMy lodging is on the cold ground," &c. Lord Radcliffe, on the death of his father in 1696-7, became Earl of Derwentwater, and died April 29th, 1705. X often a jaundice in the eyes of great men; they my tend ignorance of those ideas which are inborn in When in the full perfection of decay, So Pope, in his ESSAY ON CRITICISM : "All seems infected, that the infected spy, These lines are quoted from Lord Dorset's Verses addressed" to Mr. Edward Howard, on his incomparable incomprehensible Poem, called THE BRITISH PRINCES;" Thus the corruption of a poet is the generation of a critick, I mean of a critick in the general ac formerly they were quite They were defenders of ceptation of this age; for another species of men. poets, and commentators on their works ;-to illustrate obscure beauties; to place some passages in a better light; to redeem others from malicious interpretations; to help out an author's modesty, who is not ostentatious of his wit; and, in short, to shield him from the ill-nature of those fellows, who were then called Zoili and Momi, and now take upon themselves the venerable name of censors. But neither Zoilus, nor he who endeavoured to defame Virgil, were ever adopted into the name of criticks by the ancients. What their reputation was then, we know; and their successors in this age deserve no better. Are our auxiliary forces turned our enemies? Are they, who at best are but wits of the second order, and whose only credit amongst readers is what they obtained by being subservient to the fame of writers, are these become rebels, of slaves; and usurpers, of subjects? Or, to speak in the most honourable terms of them, are they, from our seconds, become principals against us? Does the ivy undermine the oak, which supports its weakness? What labour would it cost them to put in a better line than the worst 46 66 66 Wit, like tierce-claret, when it begins to pall, But, in its full perfection of decay, "Turns vinegar, and comes again in play." of those which they expunge in a true poet? Petronius, the greatest wit perhaps of all the Romans, yet when his envy prevailed upon his judgment to fall on Lucan, he fell himself in his attempt. He performed worse in his Essay of the Civil War, than the author of PHARSALIA; and avoiding his errours, has made greater of his own. Julius Scaliger would needs turn down Homer, and abdicate him, after the possession of three thousand years: has he succeeded in his attempt? He has indeed shewn us some of those imperfections in him, which are incident to human kind; but who had not rather be that Homer, than this Scaliger? You see the same hypercritick, when he endeavours to mend the beginning of Claudian, (a faulty poet, and living in a barbarous age,) yet how short he comes of him, and substitutes such verses of his own, as deserve the ferula. What a censure has he made of Lucan, that "he rather seems to bark than sing?" Would any but a dog have made so snarling a comparison? One would have thought he had learned Latin as late as they tell us he did Greek." Yet he came off with a pace tua,-by your good leave, Lucan; he called him not by those outrageous names of fool, booby, and blockhead: he 9 Julius Scaliger was above thirty years old before he learned Greek, and he never attained any considerable knowledge of that language. He was forty-seven years old, when his first work was published. |