mon foe;

one

But has as little as the very Parson:
Both say, they preach and write for your
instruction:

But 't is for a third day, and for induction.
The difference is, that though you like the play,
The poet's gain is ne'er beyond his day.*
But with the Parson 't is another case,
He, without holiness, may rise to grace ;
The Poet has one disadvantage more,
That if his play be dull, he's damn'd all o'er,
Not only a damn'd blockhead, but damn'd poor.
But dulness well becomes the sable garment;
I warrant that ne'er spoil'd a Priest's prefer-

ment:

Wit's not his business, and as wit now goes,
Sirs, 't is not so much yours as you suppose,
For you like nothing now but nauseous beaux.
You laugh not, gallants, as by proof appears,
At what his beauship says, but what he wears ;
So 't is your eyes are tickled, not your ears:
The tailor and the furrier find the stuff,
The wit lies in the dress, and monstrous muff.
The truth on't is, the payment of the pit
Is like for like, clip money for clip wit.
You cannot from our absent author hope,
He should equip the stage with such a fop:
Fools change in England, and new fools arise,
For though the immortal species never dies,
Yet every year new maggots make new flies.
But where he lives abroad, he scarce can find
One fool, for million that he left behind.

• The poets gain is ne'er beyond his day] Dryden did not receive for his plays from the book seller above 551. The third night brought about 70%. The dedication five or ten guineas perhaps. Tonson paid Sir Richard Steel for Addison's Drummer, 502. 1715. And Dr. Young received 50l. for his Revenge. 7121. Southerene, for his Spartan Dame, in 1722, had 120/. and now it is 100%. and 150l. There were plays on Sundays till the third year of Charles the First's reign. Otway had but one benefit for the play. Southerne was the first who had two benefits from a new representation. Farquhar had three for the Constant Couple in 1700. Three of Ben Jonson's plays, Sejanus, Cataline, and the New Inne, and two of Beaumont and Fletcher's, viz. The Faithful Shepherdess, and the Knight of the Burning Pestle, were damned the first night. Even the Silent wordan had like to have been condemned. Dr. J. W.

Yet worse, their brother poets damn the Play
And roar the loudest, though they never pay.
The fops are proud of scandal, for they cry,
At every lewd, low character-That's I.
He, who writes letters to himself, would swear
The world forgot him, if he was not there.
What should a Poet do? 'T is hard for one
To pleasure all the fools that would be shown:
And yet not two in ten will pass the town.
Most coxcombs are not of the laughing kind;
More goes to make a fop than fops can find.

[grees

Quack Maurus, though he never took de In either of our universities; Yet to be shown by some kind wit he looks, Because he play'd the fool, and writ three books. But, if he would be worth a Poet's pen. He must be more a fool, and write again : For all the former fustian stuff he wrote Was dead-born doggerel, or is quite forgot, His man of Uz, stript of his Hebrew robe, Is just the proverb, and As poor as Job One would have thought he could no longer jog; But Arthur was a level, Job's a bog. There, though he crept, yet still he kept in sight; But here, he founders in, and sinks downright. Had he prepar'd us, and been dull by rule, Tobit had first been turn'd to ridicule : But our bold Briton, without fear or awe, O'erleaps at once the whole Apocrypha ; [room Invades the Psalms with rhymes, and leaves no For any Vandal Hopkins yet to come.

But when, if after all, this godly geer Is not so senseless as it would appear; Our mountebank has laid a deeper train, His cant, like Merry Andrew's noble vein, Catcalls the sects to draw 'em in again. At leisure hours, in epic song he deals, Writes to the rumbling of his coach's wheels, Prescribes in haste, and seldom kills by rule, But rides triumphant between stool and stool.

This play, with alterations by Sir John Vanbrugh, and a secular masque, together with this prologue and an epilogue written by our author, was revived for his benefit in 1700, his fortune being at that time in as declining a state as his health; they were both spoken by Mr. Cibber, then a very young actor, much to Dryden's satisfac tion.

D

Well, let him go; 't is yet too early day, To get himself a place in farce or play. [him, We know not by what name we should arraign For no one category can contain him; A pedant, canting preacher, and a quack, Are load enough to break one ass's back: At last grown wanton, he presum'd to write, Traduc'd two kings, their kindness to requite: One made the doctor, and one dubb'd the knight.

What would you say, if we should first begin
To stop the trade of love behind the scene:
Where actresses make bold with married men ?
For while abroad' so prodigal the dolt is,
Poor spouse at home as ragged as a colt is.
In short, we'll grow as moral as we can,
Save here and there a woman or a man:
But neither you, nor we, with all our pains,
Can make clean work; there will be some re-
mains.

While you have still your Oates, and we our
Hains.

EPILOGUE TO THE PILGRIM.*

PERHAPS the parson stretch'd a point too far,
When with our theatres he waged a war.
He tells you, that this very moral age
Receiv'd the first infection from the stage.
But sure, a banish'd court, with lewdness

fraught,

The seeds of open vice, returning, brought.
Thus lodg'd (as vice by great example thrives)
It first debauch'd the daughters and the wives.
London, a fruitful soil, yet never bore
So plentiful a crop of horns before.
The Poets, who must live by courts, or starve,
Were proud so good a government to serve;
And, mixing with buffoons and pimps profane,
Tainted the Stage, for some small snip of gain.

Thus did the thriving malady prevail,
The court, its head, the Poets but the tail.
The sin was of our native growth, 't is true;
The scandal of the sin was wholly new.
Misses they were, but modestly conceal'd;
Whitehall the naked Venus first reveal'd.
Who standing as at Cyprus, in her shrine,
The strumpet was ador'd with rites divine.
Ere this, if saints had any secret motion,
'T was chamber practice all, and close devotion.
I pass the peccadillos of their time;
Nothing but open lewdness was a crime.
A monarch's blood was venial to the nation,
Compar'd with one foul act of fornication.
Now, they would silence us, and shut the door,
That let in all the barefac'd vice before.
As for reforming us, which some pretend,
That work in England is without an end:
Well may we change, but we shall never mend.
Yet, if you can but bear the present Stage,
We hope much better of the coming age.

Dryden in this epilogue labours to throw the fault of the licentiousness of dramatic writers, which had been so severely censted by the Rev. Jeremy Collier,upon the example of a court returned from banishment, accompanied by all the vices and follies of foreign climates; and whom to please was the poet's business, as he wrote to eat. D.

TRANSLATIONS FROM THEOCRITUS, LUCRETIUS, AND HORACE.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND
MISCELLANY.

For this last half year I have been troubled with the disease (as I may call it) of translation. The cold prose fits of it, which are always the most tedious with me, were spent in the History of the League; the hot, which succeeded them, in this volume of Verse Miscellanies. The truth is, I fancied to myself, a kind of ease in the change of the paroxysm; never suspecting but the humour would have wasted itself in two or three pastorals of Theocritus, and as many odes of Horace. But finding, or at least thinking I found, something that was more pleasing in them than my ordinary productions, I encouraged myself to renew my old acquaintance with Lucretius and Virgil; and immediately fixed upon some parts of them, which had most affected me in the reading. These were my natural impulses for the undertaking; but there was an accidental motive which was full as forcible, and God forgive him who was the occasion of it. It was my Lord Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse; which made me uneasy till I tried whether or no I was capable of following his rules, and of reducing the speculation into practice. For many a fair precept in Poetry is like a seeming demonstration in the Mathematics, very specious in the diagram, but failing in the mechanic operation. I think I have generally observed his instruc tions; I am sure my reason is sufficiently convinced both of their truth and usefulness; which, in other words, is to confess no less a vanity, than to pretend that I have at least in some places made examples to his rules. Yet, withal

I must acknowledge, that I have many times exceeded my commission; for I have both added and omitted, and even sometimes very boldly made such expositions of my authors, as no Dutch commentator will forgive me. Perhaps, in such particular passages, I have thought that I discovered some beauty yet undiscovered by those pedants, which none but a Poet could have found. Where I have taken away some of their expressions, and cut them shorter, it may possibly be on this consideration, that what was beautiful in the Greek or Latin, would not appear so shining in the English; and where I have enlarged them, I desire the false critics would not always think, that those thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the Poet, or may be fairly deduced from him; or at least, if both those considerations should fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an English man, they are such as he would probably have written.

For, after all, a translator is to make his author appear as charming as possibly he can, provided he maintains his character, and makes him not unlike himself. Translation is a kind of drawing after the life, where every one will acknowledge there is a double sort of likeness, a good one and a bad. 'T is one thing to draw the outlines true, the features like, the proportions exact, the colouring itself perhaps tolerable; and another thing to make all these graceful, by the posture, the shadowings, and chiefly by the spirit which animates the whole. I cannot, without some indignation, look on an ill copy of an excellent original. Much less can I be hold with patience Virgil, Homer, and some others, whose beauties I have been endeavouring all my life to imitate, so abused, as I may say, to their faces, by a botching interpreter. What English readers, unacquainted with Greek or Latin, will believe me, or any other man, when we commend those authors, and confess we derive all that is pardonable in us from their fountains, if they take those to be the same poets, whom our Ogilbys have translated? But I dare assure them, that a good Poet is no more like himself, in a dull translation, than his carcass would be to his living body. There are many, who understand Greek and Latin, and yet are ignorant of their mother tongue. The proprieties and delicacies of the English are known to few: 't is impossible even for a good wit to understand and practise them, without the help of a liberal education, long reading, and digesting of those few good authors we have amongst us, the knowledge of men and manners, the freedom of habitudes and conversation with the best company of both sexes;

and, in short, without wearing off the rust which he contracted, while he was laying in a stock of learning. Thus difficult it is to understand the purity of English, and critically to discern not only good writers from bad, and a proper style from a corrupt, but also to distinguish that which is pure in a good author, from that which is vicious and corrupt in him. And for want of all these requisites, or the greatest part of them, most of our ingenious young men take up some cried-up English Poet for their model, adore him and imitate him, as they think, without knowing wherein he is defective, where he is boyish and trifling, where in either his thoughts are improper to his subjects, or his expressions unworthy of his thoughts, or the turn of both is unharmonious.

Thus it appears necessary, that a man should be a nice critic in his mother-tongue, before he attempts to translate a foreign language. Neither is it sufficient, that he be able to judge of words and style; but he must be a master of them too: he must perfectly understand his author's tongue, and absolutely command his own. So that, to be a thorough translator, he must be a thorough poet. Neither is it enough to give his author's sense in good English, in poetical expressions, and in musical numbers; for, though all these are exceeding difficult to per form, there yet remains a harder task; and 't is a secret of which few translators have sufficiently thought. I have already hinted a word or two concerning it; that is, the maintaining the character of an author, which distinguishes him from all others, and makes him appear that individual poet, whom you would interpret. For example, not only the thoughts, but the style and versification of Virgil and Ovid, are very different: yet I see, even in our best poets, who have translated some parts of them, that they have confounded their several talents; and, by endeavouring only at the sweetness and har mony of numbers, have made them both so much alike, that if I did not know the originals, I should never be able to judge by the copies, which was Virgil, and which was Ovid. It was objected against a late noble painter,* that he drew many graceful pictures, but few of them were like. And this happened to him, because he always studied himself, more than those who sat to him. In such translators I can easily distinguish the hand which performed the work, but I cannot distinguish their poet from another. Suppose two authors are equally sweet, yet there is a great distinction to be made in sweetness, as that in sugar, and that of honey. I can

Sir P. Lely.

make the difference more plain, by giving you (if it be worth knowing) my own method of proceeding in my translations out of four several poets in this volume-Virgil, Theocritus, Lucretius, and Horace. In each of these, before I undertook them, I considered the genius and distinguishing character of my author. I looked on Virgil as a succinct, grave, and majestic writer; one who weighed not only every thought, but every word and syllable: who was still aiming to crowd his sense into as narrow a compass as possibly he could; for which reason he is so very figurative, that he requires (I may almost say) a grammar apart to construe him. His verse is every where sounding the very thing in your ears, whose sense it bears: yet the numbers are perpetually varied, to increase the delight of the reader; so that the same sounds are never repeated twice together. On the contrary, Ovid and Claudian, though they write in styles differing from each other, yet have each of them but one sort of music in their verses. All the versification and little variety of Claudian is included within the compass of four or five lines, and then he begins again in the same tenour; perpetually closing his sense at the end of a verse, and that verse commonly which they call golden, or two substantives and two adjectives, with a verb betwixt them to keep the peace. Ovid, with all his sweetness, as has little variety of numbers and sound as he: he is always, as it were, upon the hand-gallop, and his verse runs upon carpet-ground. He avoids, like the other, all Synalæphas, or cutting off one vowel when it comes before another, in the following word, so that minding only smoothness he wants both variety and majesty. But to return to Virgil: though he is smooth where smoothness is required, yet he is so far from af fecting it, that he seems rather to disdain it; frequently makes use of Synalæphas, and concludes his sense in the middle of his verse. He is every where above conceits of epigrammatic wit, and gross hyperboles; he maintains majesty in the midst of plainness; he shines, but glares not; and is stately without ambition (which is the vice of Lucan.) I drew my definition of poetical wit from my particular consideration of him: for propriety of thoughts and words are only to be found in him; and, where they are proper, they will be delightful. Pleasure follows of necessity, as the effect does the cause; and therefore is not to be put into the definition. This exact propriety of Virgil I particulary regarded, as a part of his character; but must confess, to my shame, that I have not been able to translate any part of him so well, as to make him appear wholly like him

self. For where the original is close, no ver. sion can reach it in the same compass. Hannibal Caro's in the Italian, is the nearest, the most poetical, and the most sonorous of any translation of the Eneids: yet, though he takes the advantage of blank verse, he commonly allows two lines for one of Virgil, and does not always hit his sense.. Tasso tells us, in his letters, that Speroni, a great Italian wit, who was his contemporary, observed of Virgil and Tully, that the Latin orator endeavoured to imitate the copiousness of Homer, the Greek poet; and that the Latin poet made it his business to reach the conciseness of Demosthenes, the Greek orator. Virgil therefore, being so very sparing of his words, and leaving so much to be imagined by the reader, can never be translated as he ought, in any modern tongue. To make him copious, is to alter his character; and to translate him line for line is impossible; because the Latinis naturally a more succinct language than either the Italian, Spanish, French, or even than the English, which, by reason of its monosyllables, is far the most compendious of them. Virgil is much the closest of any Roman poet, and the Latin hexameter has more feet than the English heroic.

Besides all this, an author has the choice of his own thoughts and words, which a translator has not; he is confined by the sense of the inventor to those expressions which are the nearest to it: so that Virgil, studying brevity, and having the command of his own language, could bring those words into a narrow compass, which a translator cannot render without circumlocutions. In short, they, who have called him the torture of grammarians, might also have called him the plague of translators; for he seems to have studied not to be translated. I own that, endeavouring to turn his Nisus and Euryalus as close as I was able, I have performed that Episode 'oo literaily that, giving more scope to Mezentius and Lausus, that version, which has more of the majestyof Virgil, has less of his conciseness; and all that I can promise for myself is only that I have done both better than Ogilby, and perhaps as well as Caro. So that, methinks, I come like a malefactor, to make a speech upon the gallows, and to warn all other poets, by my sad example, from the sacrilege of translating Virgil. Yet, by considering him so carefully as I did before my attempt, I have made some faint resemblance of him; and, bad I taken more time, might possibly have succeeded better; but never so well, as to have satisfied myself.

He who excels all other poets in his own lan.

guage, were it possible to do him right, must appear above them in our tongue; which, as my Lord Roscommon justly observes, approaches nearest to the Roman in its majesty: nearest indeed, but with a vast interval betwixt them. There is an inimitable grace in Virgil's words, and in theni principally consists that beauty which gives so inexpressible a pleasure to him who best understands their force. This diction of his, I must once again say, is never to be copied; and, since it cannot, he will appear but lame in the best translation. The turns of his verse, his breakings, his propriety, his numbers, and his gravity, I have as far imitated as the poverty of our language and the hastiness of my performance would allow. I may seem sometimes to have varied from his sense; but I think the greatest variations may be fairly deduced from him; and where I leave his commentators, it may be I understand him better at least I writ without consulting them in many places. But two particular lines in Mezentius and Lausus I cannot so easily excuse. They are indeed remotely allied to Virgil's sense; but they are too like the tenderness of Ovid, and were printed before I had considered them enough to alter them. The first of them I have forgotten, and cannot easily retrieve, because the copy is at the press; the second is this:

When Lausus died I was already slain.

This appears pretty enough at first sight; but I am convinced for many reasons, that the expression is too bold; that Virgil would not have said it, though Ovid would. The reader may pardon it, if he please, for the freeness of the confession; and instead of that, and the former, admit these two lines, which are more according to the author:

Nor ask I life, nor fought with that design; As I had us'd my fortune, use thou thine. Having with much ado got clear of Virgil, I nave, in the next place, to consider the genius of Lucretius, whom I have translated more happily in those parts of him which I undertook. If he was not of the best age of Roman poetry, he was at least of that which preceded it; and he himself refined it to that degree of perfection, both in the language and the thoughts, that he left an easy task to Virgil; who as he succeeded him in time, so he copied his excellences for the method of the Georgics is plainly derived from him. Lucretius had chosen a subject naturally crabbed; he therefore adorned it with poetical descriptions, and precepts of morality, in the beginning and ending of his books, which you see Virgil has imitated with great success, in those four books, which in my

opinion, are more perfect in their kind than even his divine Eneids. The turn of his verse he has likewise followed, in those places which Lucretius has most laboured, and some of his very lines he has transplanted into his own works, without much variation. If I am not mistaken, the distinguishing character of Lucretius (I mean of his soul and genius) is a certain kind of noble pride, and positive assertion of his opinions. He is every where confident of his own reason, and assuming an absolute command, not only over his vulgar reader, bu even his patron Memmius. For he is always bidding him attend, as if he had the rod 'over him, and using a magisterial authority, while he instructs him. From his time to ours I know none so like him as our poet and philosopher of Malmsbury. This is that perpetual dictatorship, which is exercised by Lucretius; who, though often in the wrong, yet seems to deal bona fide with his reader, and tells him nothing but what he thinks: in which plain sincerity, I believe, he differs from our Hobbes, who could not but be convinced, or at least doubt of some eternal truths, which he has opposed. But for Lucretius, he seems to disdain all manner of replies, and is so confident of his cause, that he is beforehand with his antagonists; urging for them whatever he imagined they could say, and leaving them, as he supposes, without an objection, for the future; all this too, with so much scorn and indignation, as if he were assured of the triumph, before he entered into the lists. From this sublime and

daring genius of his, it must of necessity come to pass, that his thoughts must be masculine, full of argumentation, and that sufficiently warm. From the same fiery temper proceeds the loftiness of his expressions, and the perpetual torrent of his verse, where the barrenness of his subject does not too much constrain the quickness of his fancy. For there is no doubt to be made, but that he could have been every where as poetical, as he is in his descriptions, and in the moral part of his Philosophy, if he had not aimed more to instruct, in his System of Nature, than to delight. But he was bent upon making Memmius a materialist, and teaching him to defy an invisible power. In short, he was so much an atheist, that he forgot sometimes to be a poet. These are the considerations which I had of that author, before I attempted to trans., late some parts of him. And accordingly I laid by my natural diffidence and scepticism for a while, to take up that dogmatical way of his, which, as I said, is so much his character, as to make him that individual Poet. As for his opi nions concerning the mortality of the soul, they