rough-drawn only, and repeated; for the haste was so 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, striking 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 firstsitting 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 better monument than a little tomb of marblę;

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 sophisticate mixtures, spoil the whole vessel of wine, to make it yield more profit. This has been the case with Shakespeare, Fletcher, Jonson, and many others s; 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 som the unnecessary young suckers, and from others the old 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 ignorant, that, by saying this of others, I expose myself to some raillery, for not using the same severe 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 supprest and cast away more than I publish; and, for the ease of myself and others, have lost, I

*Stat. Theb. lib. i. 416.

believe too, more than both. And upon these considerations I have been persuaded to overcome all the just repugnances of my own modesty, and to produce these 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 else, either surreptitiously before, or avowedly after, my death: and this will be the more excusable, when the reader shall know in what respects he may 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 assisting 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 diminution or decay of my affection to poesy; to which I had contracted myself so much under age, and so much to my own preju

dice 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 selves: neither ought any man to envy poets this posthumous 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 men "the most miserable."

And, if in quiet and flourishing 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 occasion of the civil wars and revolutions in his time: "Sed in te intuens, Brute, doleo: cujus in adolescen

"tiam, per medias laudes, quasi quadrigis vehentem, "transversa incurrit misera fortuna reipublicæ *.”

Neither is the present constitution of my mind more proper than that of the times for this exercise, or rather divertisement. There is nothing that requires so much serenity and cheerfulness of spirit ; it must not be either overwhelmed with the cares of life, or overcast with the clouds of melancholy and sorrow, or shaken and disturbed by the storms 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 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.

The cold of the country had strucken through all his faculties, and benumbed the very feet of his verses. He is himself, methinks, like one of the stories of his own Metamorphosis; and, though there remain some weak resemblances of Ovid at Rome, it is but, as he says of Niobet,

*Cic. de Clar. Orator. § 331. Metam. 1. vi. 304.

+ Metam. 1. xv. 871.