All for Love. Prologue.

Errors like straws upon the surface flow;

He who would search for pearls must dive below.

Act iv. Sc. i.

Men are but children of a larger growth.

The Tempest. Prologue.

But Shakspeare's magic could not copied be;
Within that circle none durst walk but he.

Conquest of Grenada. Part i. Sc. 1.

I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

Spanish Friar.

Act ii. Sc. 1.

There is a pleasure

In being mad which none but madmen know.

Don Sebastian. Act i. Sc. 1.

This is the porcelain clay of human kind.10

Translation of Juvenal's 10th Satire.

Look round the habitable world, how few
Know their own good, or, knowing it, pursue.

Prologue to Lee's Sophonisba.

Thespis, the first professor of our art,

At country wakes sung ballads from a cart.

Imitation of Horace.

Book i. Ode 29. Line 65.

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He, who can call to-day his own:

He who, secure within, can say,

To-morrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day.

Mac Flecknoe.

Line 20.

But Shadwell never deviates into sense.

The Cock and Fox.

Line 452.

For Art may err, but Nature cannot miss.

Theodore and Honoria.

And that one hunting, which the devil design'd For one fair female, lost him half the kind.

On Milton.

Three Poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn;
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed,
The next in majesty, in both the last.
The force of nature could no further go;
To make a third she joined the former two.

JOHN BUNYAN.

1628-1688.

Apology for his Book.
And so I penned

It down, until at last it came to be,

For length and breadth, the bigness which you see.

Some said, "John, print it," others said, "Not so," Some said, "It might do good," others said, "No."

Pilgrim's Progress.

The Slough of Despond.

EARL OF ROCHESTER.

1647-1680.

Written on the Bedchamber Door of Charles II.

Here lies our sovereign lord the king,

Whose word no man relies on;

He never says a foolish thing,

Nor ever does a wise one.

Artemisa in the Town to Chloe in the Country.

And ever since the conquest have been fools.

SHEFFIELD, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE.

1649-1721.

Essay on Poetry.

Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

There's no such thing in nature, and you'll draw
A faultless monster which the world ne'er saw.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more,
For all books else appear so mean, so poor;
Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read,
And Homer will be all the books you need.

THOMAS OTWAY.

1651-1685.

Venice Preserved. Act i. Sc. 1.

O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee
To temper man; we had been brutes without you.
Angels are painted fair to look like you.

JOHN NORRIS.

1657-1711.

The Parting.

How fading are the joys we dote upon!

Like apparitions seen and gone;

But those which soonest take their flight Are the most exquisite and strong;

Like angel's visits, short and bright, Mortality's too weak to bear them long.

When Greeks joined Greeks, then was the tug of war.

TOM BROWN.

1704.

I do not love thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this alone I know full well,
I do not love thee, Doctor Fell.* 12

"Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare;

Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te."

Martial, Ep. I. xxxiii.