4Qß" PREFACE. t vicionis taint to the unwary reader ? I would tell the world that -I have endea- voured so recover this argument out of the handsof impure writers, and to make it appear, that virtue and love are not such strangers as they are represented. This blissful intimacy of souls in that state will afford sufficient furniture for the gravest entertainment in verse ; so that itneed not be everlastingly dressed up in ridicule, nor assumed only to furnish out the lewd sonnets of the times. May some happier geniùs promote the same service that I proposed, and by superior sense, and sweeter sound, render what I have written contemptible and useless. The invitations of that noblest Latin poet of modern ages, Casimire Sarbiewski of Poland would need no excuse, did they but arise to the beauty of the original I have often taken the freedom to add ten or twenty lines, or to leave out as many, that I might suit my song more to my own design, or because I saw it impossible to present the force, the fineness, and the fire of his expression in our language. There are a few copies wherein I borrowed some hints from the same author, without the mention of "his name in the title. Methinks I can allow 'so superior a genius now and then to be lavish in his imagination, and to indulge some excursions be- yond the limits of sedate judgment: The riches and glory, of his verse make atonement in abundance. I wish some English pen would import more of his trea- sures, and bless our nation. The inscriptions to particular friends, are warranted and defended by the prac- ' tice of almost all the Lyric writers. They frequently convey the rigid rules ófmo- rality to the mind in the softer method of applause. Sustained by their exam- ple, a man will not easily be overwhelmedby the heaviest censures of the unthink- ing and unknowing ; especially when there is a shadow of this practice in the divine Psalmist, while he inscribes to Asaph or Jeduthnn his songs that were made for the harp, or, which is all one, his Lyric odes, though they are addressed to God himself. In the poems of heroic measure, I have attempted in rhyme the same variety of cadence, comma, and period, which blank verse glories in as its peculiar elegance and ornament. It degrades the excellency of the best versification when the lines run on by couplets, twenty together, just in the same pace, and with the same pauses. It spoils the noblest pleasure of the sound : The reader is tired with the tedious uniformity, or charmed to sleep with the unmanly softness of the numbers, and the perpetual chime of even cadences. In the Essays without rhyme, I have not set up Milton for a perfect' pattern ; though he shall be for ever honoured as our deliverer from the bondage. His works contain admirable and unequalled instances of bright and beautiful diction, as well as majesty and sereneness of thought. There are several episodes in his longer works, that stand in supreme dignity without a rival ; yet all that vast reverence with which I read his Paradise Lost, cannot persuade me to be charmed with every page of it. The length of his periods, and sometimes of his parenthesis, runs use out of breath: Some of his numbers seem too harsh and uneasy. I could never believe that roughness and obscurity added any thing to the true grandeur of a poem: Nor will I ever affect archaisms, exoticisms, and a quaint uncouthness of speech, in order to become perfectly Miltonian. It is my opinion that blank verse may be written with all due elevation of thought in a modern style, without bor- rowing any thing from Chaucer's tales, or running back so far as the days of Colin the shepherd, and the reign of the Fairy Queen. The oddness of an antique sound gives but a false pleasure to the ear, and abuses the true relish, evenwhen it works delight. There were some such judges of poesy among the old Romans, and Martial ingeniously laughs at one of them, that was pleased even to astonishment With obsolete wordsand figures. " Attonitusque legis terrai frugiferai. ". So the ill -drawn postures and distortions of shape that we meet with in Chinese pictures, charm a sickly fancy by their very awkwardness; so a distempered appetite will chew coals and sand, and pronounce it gustful. In the Pindarics I have generally conformed my lines to the shorter size of the ancients, and avoided to imitate the excessive lengths to which some modern wri- ters have stretched their sentences, and especially the coneluding verse. In- tlíese
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