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"In vultu color est sine sanguine: lumina mœstis "Stant immota genis: nihil est in imagine vivi."Flet tamen

The truth is, for a man to write well, it is necessary to be in good humour; neither is wit less eclipsed with the unquietness of mind, than beauty with the indisposition of body. So that it is almost as hard a thing to be a poet in despite of fortune, as it is in despite of nature. For my own part, neither my obligations to the Muses, nor expectations from them, are so great, as that I should suffer myself on no considerations to be divorced, or that I should say like Horace*,

"Quisquis erit vitæ, scribam, color."

I shall rather use his words in another placet,

"Vixi Camenis nuper idoneus,

"Et militavi non sine gloriâ:

"Nunc arma, defunctúmque bello
"Barbiton hic paries habebit."

And this resolution of mine does the more befit me, because my desire has been for some years past (though

Hor. 2 Sat. i. 60. +3 Carm. Ode xxvi. " Vixi puellis," &c,

the execution has been accidentally diverted) and does still vehemently continue, to retire myself to some of our American plantations, not to seek for gold, or enrich myself with the traffic of those parts (which is the end of most men that travel thither; so that of these Indies it is truer than it was of the former,

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Impiger extremos currit mercator ad Indos, "Per mare pauperiem fugiens-)”

but to forsake this world for ever, with all the vanities and vexations of it, and to bury myself there in some obscure retreat (but not without the consolation of letters and philosophy)

"Oblitúsque 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, methinks, I may make a just claim to the undoubted privilege of deceased poets, which is, to be read with more favour than the living;

Hor. 1 Ep. 1. 45. † Hor. 1 Ep. xi. 9.

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"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

* Mart al. 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.

The second is called "The Mistress," or

"Love

"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,

-ferat & rubus asper amomumt."

He professes too much the use of fables (though with. out 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.

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