مقالة بلغة الانجليزية

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
TORONTO, ONTARIO

ENGLISH ESSAYS
SELECTED AND EDITED BY
WALTER C. BRONSON, LITT. D.
Professor of English Literature in Brown University
V
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1909

/&-3-/S..
COPYRIGHT, 1905
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

essays, ed by
W.C. Bronson.
NY.. Holt, 1909
PEEFACE.
THIS book has been made with a definite, practical object in
view, which has set certain limits to it and determined its
nature and method. It is intended for use with college classes
in introductory courses in literature; and the chief purpose
of it is to cultivate in the undergraduate a liking for good
English prose, and to give him some knowledge of English
thought as it has found expression in English essays of the
last three hundred years, by putting into his hands a not too
bulky collection of interesting texts by some of the greater
essayists from Bacon to Stevenson. In selecting material,
therefore, chief regard has been paid to intrinsic interest of
thought and style, and entire essays or chapters have been
given whenever that was possible ;
when it was not, only Guch
extracts are presented as have a certain completeness in them-
selves. The title English Essays, which best indicates the
nature of the collection as a whole, has been interpreted lib-
erally, in order to include some interesting and valuable
matter which is not strictly of the essay type. On the other
hand, there has been no attempt to include all the good essay-
ists since Bacon, for that would have swelled the volume
unduly unless the selections were unduly short. It has not
been a main object, either, to afford illustrations of the his-
torical development of English prose style, although to a cer-
tain extent the book may be so used, and to increase its value
in this respect specimens of English prose before Bacon have
been added in the Appendix.
In furtherance of intelligibility and interest, the spelling,
capitalization, punctuation, and sometimes the paragraphing
have been modernized, except in the earlier extracts in the Ap-
pendix and in the essays of Lamb and Carlyle, where the
peculiarities of capitalization and punctuation have special
iii

iv PREFACE
charm or significance. Much care has been taken to secure a
correct text ; and whenever it has been advisable, for any reason,
to omit portions of the original, the omission has been indi-
cated by a row of points.
Biographies of the essayists represented, exposition of the
thought, and literary criticism have been excluded from the
Notes, in the belief that such matters are better conveyed by
histories of literature and by lectures. The explanatory notes
are perhaps fuller and more precise than some teachers will
care for. These may be reminded of Hazlitt's remark about
the allegory in The Faerie Queene; if one lets the notes alone,
they won't bite him. In many cases the more precise form
of statement has been used because it is more concise, as well
as more valuable for reference ;
thus it takes less space to give
the dates of a man's birth and death than to say that he lived
in the latter part of such-and-such a century, but it does not
follow that the student should be required to learn the exact
dates. As to number of notes, I cannot be alone in my ex-
perience that most college undergraduates, in the earlier
years of their course, are lamentably ignorant, not only
of literature, but of history, biography, and art, and that if
they are to understand what they read considerable annotation
is necessary. Furthermore, although the text may often be
intelligible, in a general way, without the reader's knowing
the significance of an allusion or the source of a quotation, it
may well be one of the secondary benefits of reading essays
like those here contained that the student should widen, if
only superficially and at second hand, his knowledge of the
world of letters and men. I hope, however, that all teachers
who use the book will urge their classes to read each essay
through, at first, without looking at a note, in order to get
the thought as a whole and the general effect; but also that
they will then adopt the apostolic method of St. Philip, and
put to the rider in these literary chariots that embarrassing
but profitable question,
"
Understandest thou what thou
readest?"

PEEFACE v
In conclusion I wish to express my indebtedness to Miss
Elsie Marion Straffin, A. M., Fellow in English in Brown
University, for valuable aid in collating texts, verifying ref-
erences, and reading proof.
WALTER C. BRONSON.
BROWN UNIVERSITY,
May 17, 1905.

CONTENTS
PREFACE iii
FRANCIS BACON
OP TRUTH 1
OF INNOVATIONS 3
OF NATURE IN MEN 4
OF YOUTH AND AGE 6
OF NEGOTIATING ......... 7
OF STUDIES 9
JOHN MILTON
FREEDOM OF THE PRESS 11
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
VANITY OF EARTHLY MONUMENTS 25
. JOHN DRYDEN
PREFACE TO THE FABLES 33
JONATHAN SWIFT
THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 66
SIR RICHARD STEELE
THE CLUB AT "THE TRUMPET" 81
JOSEPH ADDISON
A VERY PRETTY POET 85
TRUE AND FALSE HUMOR 89
THE VISION OF MIRZAH 92
DISSECTION OF A COQUET'S HEART 97
DANIEL DEFOE
AN ACADEMY FOR WOMEN . 101
SAMUEL JOHNSON
SHAKESPEARE 109
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
BEAU TIBBS, A CHARACTER 120
vii

viii CONTENTS
PAGE
EDMUND BURKE
ENGLAND AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION . . . . 1^,
WILLIAM HAZLITT
ON READING OLD BOOKS 140
CHARLES LAMB
NEW YEAR'S EVE . . 152
** A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 159
POOR RELATIONS 166
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
PETRARCH ATTENDS THE PARISH CHURCH .... 174
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OP SORROW 180
LITERATURE OP KNOWLEDGE AND LITERATURE OP POWER 187
THOMAS CARLYLE
BIOGRAPHY 192
HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 208
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
OLIVER GOLDSMITH 222
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
OLIVER GOLDSMITH 238
i
JOHN RUSKIN
SELECTIONS PROM MODERN PAINTERS 250
AN IDEALIST'S ARRAIGNMENT OP THE AGE .... 259
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 273
V MATTHEW ARNOLD
HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM 286
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
ON A PIECE OP CHALK 300
WALTER PATER
DIONYSUS 323
/ ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
JRs TRIPLEX 337

CONTENTS ix
PAGE
EARLY TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE
THE LORD'S PRAYER 341
THE PARABLE OP THE PRODIGAL SON 34b
SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE
OP THE HlLLES OP GOLD 850
SIR THOMAS MALORY
THE PARTING OP LAUNCELOT AND GUINEVERE . . . 351
HUGH LATIMER
AN ARRAIGNMENT OP LONDON 3"
JOHN LYLY
THE CHARACTER OP EUPHUES 85
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
HER LOVERS DESCRIBE URANIA 356
RICHARD HOOKER
THE MAJESTY AND BENEFICENCE OP LAW , 359
NOTES

ENGLISH ESSAYS.
jfrancfs Bacon.
1561-1626.
OF TRUTH.
(From Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, 1625.)
"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate; and would not stay
for an answer. Certainly there be that delight in giddiness,
and count it a bondage to fix a belief, affecting free will in
thinking as well as in acting. And though the sects of phi-
5 losophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain dis-
coursing wits which are of the same veins, though there be
not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients.
But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in
finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it im-
10 poseth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor, but
a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself. One of the
later school of the Grecians examineth the matter, and is at
a stand to think what should be in it that men should love
lies where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets, nor
15 for advantage, as with the merchant, but for the lie's sake.
But I cannot tell: this same truth is a naked and open day-
light, that doth not show the masks and mummeries and
triumphs of the world half so stately and daintily as candle-
lights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that
20 showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a
diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A
mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt
that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions,
flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would;
25 and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of

2 FRANCIS BACON
men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposi-
tion, and unpleasing to themselves? One of the fathers, in
great severity, called poesy
"
vinum daemonum " because it
filleth the imagination, and yet it is but with the shadow of a
lie. But it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but 5
the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it, that doth the hurt,
such as we spake of before. But howsoever these things are
thus in men's depraved judgments and affections, yet truth,
which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of
truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it, the knowl-10
edge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of
truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of
human nature. The first creature of God, in the works of
the days, was the light of the sense; the last was the light of
reason; and His sabbath work ever since is the illumination 15
of His Spirit. First He breathed light upon the face of the
matter, or chaos; then He breathed light into the face of
man; and still He breatheth and inspireth light into the face
of His chosen. The poet that beautified the sect that was
otherwise inferior to the rest saith yet excellently well: "It 20
is a pleasure to stand upon the shore and to see ships tossed
upon the sea; a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle
and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no
pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage
ground of truth
"
(a hill not to be commanded, and where the 25
air is always clear and serene)
"
and to see the errors and
wanderings, and mists and tempests, in the vale below"
so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swell-
ing or pride. Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a
man's mind move in charity, rest in Providence, and turn 30
upon the poles of truth.
To pass from theological and philosophical truth to the truth
of civil business: it will be acknowledged, even by those that
practise it not, that clear and round dealing is the honor of
man's nature, and that mixture of falsehood is like allay in 35
coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the
better but it embaseth it; for these winding and crooked
courses are the goings of the serpent, which goeth basely upon

OF INNOVATIONS 3
the belly and not upon the feet. There is no vice that doth
so cover a man with shame as to be found false and perfidious:
and therefore Montaigne saith prettily, when he inquired the
reason why the word of the lie should be such a disgrace
5 and such an odious charge, saith he,
"
If it be well weighed,
to say that a man lieth is as much to say as that he is, brave
towards God and a coward towards men." For a lie faces
God and shrinks from man. Surely the wickedness of false-
hood and breach of faith cannot possibly be so highly ex-
10 pressed as in that it shall be the last peal to call the judg-
ments of God upon the generations of men, it being foretold
that when Christ cometh " He shall not find faith upon the
earth."
OF INNOVATIONS.
(From the same.)
As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so
15 are all innovations, which are the births of time; yet, not-
withstanding, as those that first bring honor into their family
are commonly more worthy than most that succeed, so the
first precedent (if it be good) is seldom attained by imita-
tion: for ill, to man's nature as it stands perverted, hath a
20 natural motion strongest in continuance; but good, as a
forced motion, strongest at first. Surely every medicine is
an innovation; and he that will not apply new remedies must
expect new evils: for time is the greatest innovator; and if
time of course alter things to the worse, and wisdom an'1
-35 counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be tho
end? It is true that what is settled by custom, though it b>
not good, yet at least it is fit; and those things which hav
long gone together are, as it were, confederate within them
selves: whereas new things piece not so well; but though they
30 help by their utility, yet they trouble by their inconformity;
besides, they are like strangers, more admired and less
favored. All this is true, if time stood still; which, contrari-
wise, moveth so round that a froward retention of custom is
as turbulent a thing as an innovation; and they that reverence

4 FKANCIS BACON
too much old times are but a scorn to the new. It were good,
therefore, that men in their innovations would follow the
example of time itself, which indeed innovateth greatly, but
quietly and by degrees scarce to be perceived: for otherwise
whatsoever is new is unlooked for, and ever it mends some 5
and pairs other; and he that is holpen takes it for a fortune
and thanks the time; and he that is hurt, for a wrong and
imputeth it to the author. It is good also not to try experi-
ments in States, except the necessity be urgent or the utility
evident: and well to beware that it be the reformation that 10
draweth on the change, and not the desire of change that pre-
tendeth the reformation: and lastly, that the novelty, though
it be not rejected, yet be held for a suspect; and as the Script-
ure saith,
" That we make a stand upon the ancient way, and
then look about us, and discover what is the straight and 15
right way, and so to walk in it."
OF NATURE IN MEN.
(From the same.)
Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extin-
guished. Force maketh nature more violent in the return; doc-
trine and discourse maketh nature less importune; but custom
only doth alter and subdue nature. He that seeketh victory 20
over his nature, let him not set himself too great nor too small
tasks; for the first will make him dejected by often failings,
and the second will make him a small proceeder though by
often prevailings. And, at the first, let him practise with
helps, as swimmers do with bladders or rushes; but, after a 25
time, let him practise with disadvantages, as dancers do
with thick shoes, for it breeds great perfection if the practice
be harder than the use. When nature is mighty, and there-
fore the victory hard, the degrees had need be, first, to stay and
arrest nature in time, like to him that would say over the 30
four and twenty letters when he was angry; then to go less in
quantity, as if one should, in forbearing wine, come from
drinking healths to a draught at a meal; and, lastly, to dis-

OF NATUKE IN MEN 5
continue altogether. But if a man have the fortitude and
resolution to enfranchise himself at once, that is the best:
"
Optimus ille animi vindex laedentia pectus
Vincula qui rupit, dedoluitque semel."
6 Neither is the ancient rule amiss, to bend nature as a wand to
a contrary extreme, whereby to set it right; understanding
it, where the contrary extreme is no vice. Let not a man
force a habit upon himself with a perpetual continuance, but
with some intermission: for both the pause reinforceth the
10 new onset; and if a man that is not perfect be ever in prac-
tice, he shall as well practise his errors as his abilities and
induce one habit of both, and there is no means to help this
but by seasonable intermissions. But let not a man trust his
victory over his nature too far, for nature will lay buried a
15 great time and yet revive upon the occasion or temptation;
like as it was with ^Esop's damsel, turned from a cat to a
woman, who sat very demurely at the board's end till a mouse
ran before her: therefore let a man either avoid the occasion
altogether, or put himself often to it that he may be little
20 moved with it. A man's nature is best perceived in private-
ness, for there is no affectation; in passion, for that putteth
a man out of his precepts; and in a new case or experiment,
for there custom leaveth him. They are happy men whose
natures sort with their vocations; otherwise they may say,
25
"
Multum incola fuit anima mea," when they converse in
those things they do not affect. In studies, whatsoever a man
commandeth upon himself, let him set hours for it; but what-
soever is agreeable to his nature, let him take no care for any
set times, for his thoughts will fly to it of themselves, so as
30 the spaces of other business or studies will suffice. A man's
nature runs either to herbs or weeds; therefore let him season-
ably water the one and destroy the other.

6 FRANCIS BACON
OF YOUTH AND AGE.
(From the same.)
A man that is young in years may be old in hours, if he
have lost no time; but that happeneth rarely. Generally,
youth is like the first cogitations, not so wise as the second,
for there is a youth in thoughts as well as in ages; and yet
the invention of young men is more lively than that of old, 5
and imaginations stream into their minds better, and, as it
were, more divinely. Natures that have much heat, and
great and violent desires and perturbations, are not ripe for
action till they have passed the meridian of their years; as it
was with Julius Caesar and Septimius Severus, of the latter 10
of whom it is said,
"
Juventutem egit erroribus, immo furori-
bus plenam "; and yet he was the ablest emperor, almost, of
all the list. But reposed natures may do well in youth, as it
is seen in Augustus Cgesar, Cosmos Duke of Florence, Gaston
de Foix, and others. On the other side, heat and vivacity in 15
age is an excellent composition for business. Young men are
fitter to invent than to judge, fitter for execution than .for
counsel, and fitter for new projects than for settled business;
for the experience of age, in things that fall within the com-
pass of it, directeth them, but in new things abuseth them 20
The errors of young men are the ruin of business; but the
errors of aged men amount but to this, that more might have
been done or sooner.
Young men, in the conduct and manage of actions, embrace
more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly 25
to the end without consideration of the means and degrees;
pursue some few principles which they have chanced upon,
absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown incon-
veniences; use extreme remedies at first, and, that which
doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them 30
like an unready horse, that will neither stop nor turn. Men
of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little,
repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full
period but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

OF NEGOTIATING 7
Certainly it is good to compound employments of both: for
that will be good for the present, because the virtues of either
age may correct the defects of both; and good for succession,
that young men may be learners, while men in age are actors;
5 and, lastly, good for extern accidents, because authority fol-
loweth old men, and favor and popularity youth. But for the
moral part perhaps youth will have the pre-eminence, as age
hath for the politic. A certain rabbin, upon the text,
" Your
young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream
10 dreams," inferreth that young men are admitted nearer to
God than old, because vision is a clearer revelation than a
dream. And, certainly, the more a man drinketh of the world
the more it intoxicateth; and age doth profit rather in the
powers of understanding than in the virtues of the will and
15 affections.
There be some have an over-early ripeness in their years,
which fadeth betimes. These are, first, such as have brittle
wits, the edge whereof is soon turned; such as was Her-
mogenes the rhetorician, whose books are exceeding subtle,
20 who afterwards waxed stupid. A second sort is of those that
have some natural dispositions which have better grace in
youth than in age, such as is a fluent and luxuriant speech,
which becomes youth well but not age; so Tully saith of Hor-
tensius,
" Idem manebat, neque idem decebat." The third is
25 of such as take too high a strain at the first, and are mag-
nanimous more than tract of years can uphold; as was Scipio
Africanus, of whom Livy saith in effect, "Ultima primis
cedebant."
OP NEGOTIATING.
(From the same.)
It is generally better to deal by speech than by letter, and
30 by the mediation of a third than by a man's self. Letters
are good when a man would draw an answer by letter back
again, or when it may serve for a man's justification after-
wards to produce his own letter, or where it may be danger
to be interrupted or heard by pieces. To deal in person ia

8 FRANCIS BACON
good when a man's face breedeth regard, as commonly with
inferiors; or in tender cases, where a man's eye upon the
countenance of him with whom he speaketh may give him a
direction how far to go; and generally, where a man will
reserve to himself liberty either to disavow or to expound. In 5
choice of instruments it is better to choose men of a plainer
sort, that are like to do that that is committed to them and
to report back again faithfully the success, than those that are
cunning to contrive out of other men's business somewhat to
grace themselves, and will help the matter in report for satis- 10
faction sake. Use also such persons as affect the business
wherein they are employed, for that quickeneth much; and
such as are fit for the matter, as bold men for expostulation,
fair-spoken men for persuasion, crafty men for inquiry and
observation, freward and absurd men for business that doth 15
not well bear out itself. Use also such as have been lucky
and prevailed before in things wherein you have employed
them; for that breeds confidence, and they will strive to
maintain their prescription.
It is better to sound a person with whom one deals, afar 20
off, than to fall upon the point at first, except you mean to
surprise him by some short question. It is better dealing
with men in appetite than with those that are where they
would be. If a man deal with another upon conditions, the
start, or first performance, is all; which a man cannot reason- 25
ably demand, except either the nature of the thing be such
which must go before, or else a man can persuade the other
party that he shall still need him in some other thing, or else
that he be counted the honester man. All practice is to dis-
cover or to work. Men discover themselves in trust, in pas- 30
sion, at unawares, and of necessity when they would have
somewhat done and cannot find an apt pretext. If you would
work any man, you must either know his nature and fashions
and so lead him, or his ends and so persuade him, or his weak-
ness and disadvantages and so awe him, or those that have in- 35
terest in him and so govern him. In dealing with cunning
persons we must ever consider their ends to interpret their
speeches; and it is good to say little to them, and that which

OF STUDIES 9
they least look for. In all negotiations of difficulty a man
may not look to sow and reap at once, but must prepare busi-
ness and so ripen it by degrees.
OF STUDIES.
(From the same.)
Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.
5 Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring; for
ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment
and disposition of business: for expert men can execute, and
perhaps judge of particulars one by one; but the general coun-
sels and the plots and marshalling of affairs come best from
10 those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies
is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation;
to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a
scholar. They perfect nature and are perfected by experience:
for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning
15 by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too
much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.
Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and
wise men use them; for they teach not their own use, but that
is a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation.
20 Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take
for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and
consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swal-
lowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some
books are to be read only in parts, others to be read but not
25 curiously, and some few to be read wholly and with diligence
and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and
extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in
the less important arguments and the meaner sort of books;
elge, distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy
30 things. Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man,
and writing an exact man; and therefore if a man write little,
he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had
need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had

10 FKANCIS BACON"
need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, sub-
tile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhet-
oric, able to contend.
"
Abeunt studia in mores." Nay, there
is no stand or impediment in the wit but may be wrought out 5
by fit studies, like as diseases of the body may have appro-
priate exercises. Bowling is good for the stone and reins,
shooting for the lungs and breast, gentle walking for the
stomach, riding for the head, and the like. So, if a man's
wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics, for in dem- 10
onstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must
begin again; if his wit be not apt to distinguish or find dif-
ferences, let him study the schoolmen, for they are cymini
sectores; if he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up
one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the 15
lawyers' cases: so every defect of the mind may have a special
receipt.

Sobn /HMlton.
1608-1674.
FEEEDOM OF THE PEESS.
(From Areopagitica, 1644.)
I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the
Church and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books
demean themselves as well as men, and thereafter to confine,
imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors: for
5 books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency
of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny
they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy
and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I
know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those
10 fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may
chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand,
unless wariness be used, as good, almost, kill a man as kill
a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's
image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself,
15 kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man
lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious
life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on
purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore
a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions
20 of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the
want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be
wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against the living
labors of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man,
preserved and stored up in books, since we see a kind of homi-
25 cide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if
it extend to the whole impression a kind of massacre, whereof
the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but
11

12 JOHN MILTON
strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason
itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.
Good and evil, we know, in the field of this world grow
up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good
is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and 5
in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that
those confused seeds, which were imposed on Psyche as an
incessant labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more
intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted
that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving 10
together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is
that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and
evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil. As, there-
fore, the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be
to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowl-15
edge of evil?_ He that can apprehend and consider vice with
all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet
distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is
the true wayfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and
cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never 20
sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race
where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without
dust and heat. VAssuredly we bring not innocence into the
world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies
us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue 25
therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of
evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her
followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her
whiteness is but an excremental whiteness; which was the
reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare 30
be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas,
describing true temperance under the person of Guyon, brings
him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon and
the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know and
yet abstain. Since, therefore, the knowledge and survey of 35
vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human
virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth,

how can we more safely and with less danger scout into the
regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of
tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the
benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.
6 Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and
knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and com-
plexion. Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming
fountain: if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression,
they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.
10 A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things
only because his pastor says so or the assembly so determines,
without knowing other reason, though his belief be true yet
the very truth he holds becomes his heresy. There is not any
. burden that some would gladlier post off to another than the
15 charge and care of their religion. There be who knows not
that there be? of Protestants and professors who live and
die in as arrant an implicit faith as any lay Papist of Loretto.
A wealthy man addicted to his pleasure and to his profits
finds religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so many
20 piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill to
keep a stock going upon that trade. What should he do?
Fain he would have the name to be religious, fain he would
bear up with his neighbors in that. What does he, therefore,
but resolves to give over toiling, and to find himself out some
35 factor, to whose care and credit he may commit the whole
managing of his religious affairs; some divine of note and
estimation, that must be. To him he adheres, resigns the
whole warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys,
into his custody; and indeed makes the very person of that
30 man his religion, esteems his associating with him a sufficient
evidence and commendatory of his own piety. So that a man
may say his religion is now no more within himself, but is
become a dividual movable, and goes and comes near him
according as that good man frequents the house. He enter-
85 tains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him: his Religion
comes home at night, prays, is liberally supped and sumptu-
ously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted, and after the malmsey or

14 JOHN MILTON
some well-spiced brewage, and better breakfasted than He
whose morning appetite would have gladly fed on green figs
between Bethany and Jerusalem, his Eeligion walks abroad
at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop trading
all day without his Religion. 5
There is yet behind, of what I purposed to lay open, the
incredible loss and detriment that this plot of licensing puts
us to. More than if some enemy at sea should stop up all
our havens and ports and creeks, it hinders and retards the
importation of our richest merchandise, Truth: nay, it was 10
first established and put in practice by anti-Christian malice
and mystery on set purpose to extinguish, if it were possible,
the light of Eeformation, and to settle falsehood, little differ-
ing from that policy wherewith the Turk upholds his Alcoran
by the prohibition of printing. 'Tis not denied, but gladly 15
confessed, we are to send our thanks and vows to Heaven,
louder than most of nations, for that great measure of truth
which we enjoy, especially in those main points between us
and the Pope, with his appurtenances the prelates; but he
who thinks we are to pitch our tent here, and have attained 20
the utmost prospect of reformation that the mortal glass
wherein we contemplate can show us, till we come to beatific
vision, that man by this very opinion declares that he is yet
far short of Truth.
Truth indeed came once into the world with her Divine 25
Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on:
but when He ascended, and His apostles after Him were laid
asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who,
as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his con-
spirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin 30
Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and
scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since,
the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the
careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris,
went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they 35
could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and
Commons, nor ever shall do till her Master's second coming; He

FKEEDOM OF THE PKESS 15
shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mould
them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.
Suffer not these licensing prohibitions to stand at every place
of opportunity, forbidding and disturbing them that continue
5 seeking, that continue to do our obsequies to the torn body of
our martyred saint. We boast our light; but if we look not
wisely on the sun itself, it smites us into darkness. Who can
discern those planets that are oft combust, and those stars of
brightest magnitude that rise and set with the sun, until the
10 opposite motion of their orbs bring them to such a place in the
firmament where they may be seen evening or morning? The
light which we have gained was given us, not to be ever
staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote
from our knowledge. It is not the unfrocking of a priest, the
15 unmitring of a bishop, and the removing him from off the
Presbyterian shoulders, that will make us a happy nation; no,
if other things as great in the Church and in the rule of life,
both economical and political, be not looked into and re-
formed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zuinglius
20 and Calvin hath beaconed up to us that we are stark blind.
, There be who perpetually complain of schisms and sects, and
make it such a calamity that any man dissents from their
maxims. 'Tis their own pride and ignorance which causes
the disturbing, who neither will hear with meekness nor can
25 convince, yet all must be suppressed which is not found in
their Syntagma. They are the troublers, they are the dividers
of unity, who neglect and permit not others to unite those
dissevered pieces which are yet wanting to the body of Truth.
To be still searching what we know not by what we know,
30 still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her body
is homogeneal and proportional), this is the golden rule in
theology as well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best
harmony in a church, not the forced and outward union of
cold and neutral and inwardly divided minds.
85 Lords and Commons of England, consider what nation it
is whereof ye are and whereof ye are the governorship nation
not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing
'*
spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not -(
I?

16 JOHN MILTON
beneath the reach of any point the highest that human
capacity can soar to. Therefore the studies of Learning in
her deepest sciences have been so ancient and so eminent
among us that writers of good antiquity and ablest judgment
have been persuaded that even the school of Pythagoras and 5
the Persian wisdom took beginning from the old philosophy
of this island. And that wise and civil Eoman, Julius Agric-
ola, who governed once here for Caesar, preferred the natural
wits of Britain before the labored studies of the French. Nor
is it for nothing that the grave and frugal Transylvanian 10
sends out yearly from as far as the mountainous borders of
Eussia and beyond the Hercynian wilderness, not their youth,
but their staid men, to learn our language and our theologic
arts. Yet that which is above all this, the favor and the love
of Heaven we have great argument to think in a peculiar 15
manner propitious and propending towards us. Why else
was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her as
out of Sion should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first
tidings and trumpet of Eeformation to all Europe? And
had it not been the obstinate perverseness of our prelates 20
against the divine and admirable spirit of Wiclif, to suppress
him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bo-
hemian Huss and Jerome, no, nor the name of Luther or of
Calvin, had been ever known: the glory of reforming all our
neighbors had been completely ours. But now, as our ob-25
durate clergy have with violence demeaned the matter, we are
become hitherto the latest and the backwardest scholars of
whom God offered to have made us the teachers. Now once
again, by all concurrence of signs, and by the general instinct
of holy and devout men as they daily and solemnly express 30
their thoughts, God is decreeing to begin some new and great
period in His Church, even to the reforming of Eeformation
itself: what does He, then, but reveal Himself to His servants,
and, as His manner is, first to His Englishmen? I say, as
His manner is, first to us, though we mark not the method of 35
His counsels and are unworthy. Behold now this vast city:
a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed
and surrounded with His protection; the shop of war hath

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS 1?
not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out
the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of
beleaguered Truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting
by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new
6 notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage
and their fealty, the approaching Reformation, others as fast
reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason
and convincement. What could a man require more from a
nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge? What
10 wants there to such a towardly and pregnant soil but wise
and faithful laborers, to make a knowing people, a nation of
prophets, of sages, and of worthies? We reckon more than
five months yet to harvest: there need not be five weeks; had
we but eyes to lift up, the fields are white already. ^~Where
15 there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much
arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good
men is but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic
terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous
thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath
20 stirred up in this city._ What some lament of we rather
should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious forwardness
among men to reassume the ill-deputed care of their religion
into their own hands again. A little generous prudence, a
little forbearance of one another, and some grain of charity
25 might win all these diligences to join and unite in one general
and brotherly search after truth, could we but forego this
prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and Chris-
tian liberties into canons and precepts of men. I doubt not,
if some great and worthy stranger should come among us,
30 wise to discern the mould and temper of a people and how
to govern it, observing the high hopes and aims, the diligent
alacrity of our extended thoughts and reasonings in the pur-
suance of truth and freedom, but that he would cry out as
Pyrrhus did, admiring the Eoman docility and courage,
" If
35 such were my Epirots, I would not despair the greatest
design that could be attempted to make a church or kingdom
happy!
" Yet these are the men cried out against for schis-
matics and sectaries; as if, while the temple of the Lord was

18 JOHN MILTON
building, some cutting, some squaring the marble, others
hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of irrational men
who could not consider there must be many schisms and many
dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the
house of God can be built. And when every stone is laid 5
artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it
can but be contiguous in this world; neither can every piece
of the building be of one form; nay, rather, the perfection
consists in this, that, out of many moderate varieties and
brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportional, 10
arises the goodly and the graceful symmetry that commends
the whole pile and structure. Let us, therefore, be more
considerate builders, more wise in spiritual architecture, when
great reformation is expected. For now the time seems come
wherein Moses, the great prophet, may sit in heaven rejoicing 15
to see that memorable and glorious wish of his fulfilled, when
not only our seventy Elders, but all the Lord's people, are
become prophets. No marvel, then, though some men, and
some good men, too, perhaps, but young in goodness, as
Joshua then was, envy them. They fret, and out of their 20
own weakness are in agony, lest those divisions and sub-
divisions will undo us. The adversary again applauds, and
waits the hour: "When they have branched themselves out,"
saith he,
"
small, enough into parties and partitions, then will
be our time." Fool! he sees not the firm root out of which 25
we all grow, though into branches; nor will beware until he
see our small divided maniples cutting through at every angle
of his ill-united and unwieldy brigade^ And that we are to
hope better of all these supposed sects and schisms, and that
we shall not need that solicitude, honest perhaps though over- 30
timorous, of them that vex in this behalf, but shall laugh in
the end at those malicious applauders of our differences, I
have these reasons to persuade me.
-
First, when a city shall be as it were besieged and blocked
about, her navigable river infested, inroads and incursions 35
round, defiance and battle oft rumored to be marching up
even to her walls and suburb trenches, that then the people,
or the greater part, more than at other times, wholly taken

up with the study of highest and most important matters to
be reformed, should be disputing, reasoning, reading, invent-
ing, discoursing, even to a rarity and admiration, things not
before discoursed or written of, argues first a singular good-
5 will, contentedness, and confidence in your prudent foresight
and safe government, Lords and Commons; and from thencey
Ve
VCv"
derives itself to a gallant bravery and well-grounded con-
tempt of their enemies, as if there were no small number of
as great spirits among us as his was who, when Rome was nigh
10 besieged by Hannibal, being in the city, bought that piece of
ground, at no cheap rate, whereon Hannibal himself en-
camped his own regiment. )
, Next, it is a lively and cheerful
presage of our happy success and victory. For as in a body,
when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous, not
15 only to vital but to rational faculties, and those in the acutest
and the pertest operations of wit and subtlety, it argues in
what good plight and constitution the body is, so when the
cheerfulness of the people is so sprightly up as that it has, not
only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety, but
20 to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points
of controversy and new invention, it betokens us not degen-
erated nor drooping to a fatal decay, but casting off the old
and wrinkled skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and
wax young again, entering the glorious ways of truth and
25 prosperous virtue destined to become great and honorable in
these latter ages. Methinks I see in my mind a noble and
puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep
and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an
eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled
30 eyes at the full midday beam, purging and unsealing her
long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance;
while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with
those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what
she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a
35 year of sects and schisms.
What should ye do, t
then, should ye suppress all this flowery
crop of knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing
daily in this city, should ye set an oligarchy of twenty en-

20 JOHN MILTON
grossers over it, to bring a famine upon our minds again,
when we shall know nothing but what is measured to us by
their bushel? Believe it, Lords and Commons, they who
counsel ye to such a suppressing do as good as bid ye suppress
yourselves; and I will soon show how. If it be desired to 5
know the immediate cause of all this free writing and free
speaking, there cannot be assigned a truer than your own
mild and free and humane government: it is the liberty, Lords
and Commons, which your own valorous and happy counsels
have purchased us, liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; 10
this is that which hath rarefied and enlightened our spirits
like the influence of heaven; this is that which hath enfran-
chised, enlarged, and lifted up our apprehensions degrees
above themselves. Ye cannot make us now less capable, less
knowing, less eagerly pursuing of the truth, unless ye first 15
make yourselves, that made us so, less the lovers, less the
founders, of our true liberty. We can grow ignorant again,
brutish, formal, and slavish, as ye found us; but you then
must first become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbi-
trary, and tyrannous, as they were from whom ye have freed 20
us. That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts
more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and
exactest things, is the issue of your own virtue propagated in
us; ye cannot suppress that unless ye reinforce an abrogated
and merciless law, that fathers may despatch at will their own 25
children. And who shall, then, stick closest to ye, and excite
others? not he who takes up arms for cote and conduct and
his four nobles of Danegelt although I dispraise not the
defence of just immunities, yet love my peace better if that
x were all. Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue 30
A
freely, according to conscience, above all liberties.
And now the time in special is, by privilege, to write and
speak what may help to the further discussing of matters in
agitation. The temple of Janus with his two controversal 35
faces might now not unsignificantly be set open. And though
all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth,
so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and

prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood
grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and
open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest sup-
pressing. He who hears what praying there is for light and
5 clearer knowledge to be sent down among us would think of
other matters to be constituted beyond the discipline of
Geneva, framed and fabricked already to our hands. l
Yet
when the new light which we beg for shines in upon us, there
be who envy and oppose if it come not first in at their case-
10 ments. What a collusion is this, whenas we are exhorted by
the Wise Man to use diligence, to seek for wisdom as for
hidden treasures early and late, that another order shall
enjoin us to know nothing but by statute! When a man hath
been laboring the hardest labor in the deep mines of knowl-
15 edge, hath furnished out his findings in all their equipage,
drawn forth his reasons as it were a battle ranged, scattered
and defeated all objections in his way, calls out his adversary
into the plain, offers him the advantage of wind and sun if
he please, only that he may try the matter by dint of argu-
20 ment, for his opponents then to skulk, to lay ambushments,
to keep a narrow bridge of licensing where the challenger
should pass, though it be valor enough in soldiership, is but
weakness and cowardice in the wars of Truth. For who
knows not that Truth is strong next to the Almighty,? i She
25 needs no policies, no stratagems, nor licensings to make her
victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that Error
uses against her power.J
Give her but room, and do not bind
her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true, as the old
Proteus did, who spake oracles only when he was caught and
30 bound; but then rather she turns herself into all shapes except
her own, and perhaps tunes her voice according to the time,
as Micaiah did before Ahab, until she be adjured into her
own likeness. Yet is it not impossible that she may have
more shapes than one. What else is all that rank of things
35 indifferent, wherein Truth may be on this side or on the
other, without being unlike herself? What but a vain
shadow else is the abolition of those ordinances, that hand-
writing nailed to the Cross, what great purchase is this Chris-

22 JOHN MILTON
tian liberty which Paul so often boasts of? His doctrine is
that he who eats or eats not, regards a day or regards it not,
may do either to the Lord. How many other things might be
tolerated in peace and left to conscience, had we but charity,
and were it not the chief stronghold of our hypocrisy to be 5
ever judging one another. I fear yet this iron yoke of out-
ward conformity hath left a slavish print upon our necks;
the ghost of a linen decency yet haunts us. We stumble and
are impatient at the least dividing of one visible congregation
from another, though it be not in fundamentals; and through 10
our forwardness to suppress, and our backwardness to recover
any enthralled piece of truth out of the gripe of custom, we
care not to keep truth separated from truth, which is the
fiercest rent and disunion of all. We do not see that while
we still affect by all means a rigid external formality, we may 15
as soon fall again into a gross conforming stupidity, a stark
and dead congealment of wood and hay and stubble forced
and frozen together, which is more to the sudden degenerating
of a church than many subdichotomies of petty schisms. Not
that I can think well of every light separation, or that all in 20
a church is to be expected gold and silver and precious stones:
it is not possible for man to sever the wheat from the tares,
the good fish from the other fry; that must be the angels'
ministry at the end of mortal things. Yet if all cannot be of
one mind as who looks they should be? this doubtless is 35
more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian: that
many be tolerated rather than all compelled. I mean not
tolerated Popery and open superstition, which, as it extirpates
all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extir-
pate, provided first that all charitable and compassionate 30
means be used to win and regain the weak and misled: that
also which is impious or evil absolutely, either against faith
or manners, no law can possibly permit that intends not to
itself: but those neighboring differences, or rather in-
differences, are what I speak of, whether in some point of 35
doctrine or of discipline, which, though they may be many,
yet need not interrupt the unity of spirit if we could but find
among us the bond of peace. In the meanwhile, if any one

would write, and bring his helpful hand to the slow-moving
Reformation which we labor under, if Truth have spoken to
him before others, or but seemed at least to speak, who hath
so bejesuited us that we should trouble that man with asking
5 licence to do so worthy a deed? and not consider this, that if
it come to prohibiting there is not aught more likely to be pro-
hibited than truth itself, whose first appearance to our eyes,
bleared and dimmed with prejudice and custom, is more un-
sightly and unplausible than many errors, even as the person
10 is of many a great man slight and contemptible to see to?
And what do they tell us vainly of new opinions, when this
very opinion of theirs, that none must be heard but whom
they .like, is the worst and newest opinion of all others, and is
the chief cause why sects and schisms do so much abound
15 and true knowledge is kept at distance from us? Besides yet
a greater danger which is in it: for when God shakes a king-
dom with strong and healthful commotions to a general re-
forming, 'tis not untrue that many sectaries and false teachers
are then busiest in seducing; but yet more true it is that God
20 then raises to His own work men of rare abilities and more
than common industry, not only to look back and revise what
hath been taught heretofore, but to gain further and go on
some new enlightened steps in the discovery of truth. For
such is the order of God's enlightening His Church, to dis-
25 pense and deal out by degrees His beam so as our earthly eyes
may best sustain it. Neither is God appointed and confined,
where and out of what place these His chosen shall be first
heard to speak: for He sees not as man sees, chooses not as
man chooses, lest we should devote ourselves again to set
30 places and assemblies and outward callings of men, planting
our faith one while in the old Convocation House and another
while in the Chapel at Westminster; when all the faith and
religion that shall be there canonized is not sufficient, without
plain convincement and the charity of patient instruction, to
35 supple the least bruise of conscience, to edify the meanest
Christian who desires to walk in the Spirit and not in the
letter of human trust, for all the number of voices that can be
there made, no, though Harry the Seventh himself there, with

24 JOHN MILTON
all his liege tombs about him, should lend them voices from
the dead to swell their number. And if the men be erroneous
who appear to be the leading schismatics, what withholds us
but our sloth, our self-will, and distrust in the right cause
that we do not give them gentle meetings and gentle dis-5
missions, that we debate not and examine the matter thor-
oughly with liberal and frequent audience, if not for their
sakes yet for our own, seeing no man who hath tasted learning
but will confess the many ways of profiting by those who, not
contented with stale receipts, are able to manage and set forth 10
new positions to the world? And were they but as the dust
and cinders of our feet, so long as in that notion they may
serve to polish and brighten the armory of Truth, even
for that respect they were not utterly to be cast away^_But
if they be of those whom God hath fitted for the special use 15
of these times with eminent and ample gifts, and those per-
haps neither among the priests nor among the Pharisees, and
we in the haste of a precipitant zeal shall make no distinction,
but resolve to stop their mouths, because we fear they come
with new and dangerous opinions, as we commonly fore-judge 20
them ere we understand them, no less than woe to us, while,
thinking thus to defend the Gospel, we are found the perse-
cutors.

Sir ZTbomas iBrowne,
1605-1682.
VANITY OF EAETHLY MONUMENTS.
(HydriotapUa : Urn Burial, Chapter V., 1658.)
Now since these dead bones have already out-lasted the
living ones of Methuselah, and in a yard underground, and
thin walls of clay, out-worn all the strong and specious build-
ings above it, and quietly rested under the drums and
5 tramplings of three conquests, what prince can promise such
diuturnity unto his relics, or might not gladly say,
" Sic ego componi versus In ossa velim
"
?
Time, which antiquates antiquities, and hath an art to make
dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor monuments.
10 In vain we hope to be known by open and visible conserva-
tories, when to be unknown was the means of their continua-
tion, and obscurity their protection. If they died by violent
hands and were thrust into their urns, these bones become
considerable, and some old philosophers would honor them,
15 whose souls they conceived most pure which were thus
snatched from their bodies, and to retain a stronger propen-
sion unto them; whereas they weariedly left a languishing
corpse, and with faint desires of re-union. If they fell by
long and aged decay, yet, wrapt up in the bundle of time,
20 they fall into indistinction and make but one blot with in-
fants. If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but
a prolongation of death, our life is a sad composition; we live
with death, and die not in a moment. How many pulses
made up the life of Methuselah, were work for Archimedes:
25 common counters sum up the life of Moses his man. Our
days become considerable, like petty sums, by minute accu-
mulations, where numerous fractions make up but small
25

26 SIR THOMAS BROWNE
round numbers; and our days of a span long make not one
little finger.
If the nearness of our last necessity brought a nearer con-
formity into it, there were a happiness in hoary hairs and no
calamity in half senses. But the long habit of living indis-5
poseth us for dying; when avarice makes us the sport of death,
when even David grew politicly cruel, and Solomon could
hardly be said to be the wisest of men. But many are too
early old, and before the date of age. Adversity stretcheth
our days, misery makes Alcmena's nights, and time hath no 10
wings unto it. But the most tedious being is that which can
unwish itself, content to be nothing or never to have been,
which was beyond the mal-content of Job, who cursed not the
day of his life but his nativity, content to have so far been
as to have a title to future being, although he had lived here 15
but in an hidden state of life, and, as it were, an abortion.
What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed
when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions,
are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these
ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept 20
with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution.
But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies
these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarism; not
to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except
we consult the provincial guardians or tutelary observators. 25
Had they made as good provision for their names as they
have done for their relics, they had not so grossly erred in the
art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but
pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes,
which in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have 30
found unto themselves a fruitless continuation, and only arise
unto late posterity as emblems of mortal vanities, antidotes
against pride, vain-glory, and madding vices! Pagan vain-
glories, which thought the world might last forever, had
encouragement for ambition; and, finding no Atropos unto 35
the immortality of their names, were never dampt with the
necessity of oblivion. Even old ambitions had the advantage
of ours, in the attempts of their vain-glories, who, acting

VANITY OP EABTHLY MONUMENTS 21
early and before the probable meridian of time, have by this
time found great accomplishment of their designs, whereby
the ancient heroes have already out-lasted their monuments
and mechanical preservations. But in this latter scene of
5 time we cannot expect such mummies unto our memories,
when ambition may fear the prophecy of Elias, and Charles
the Fifth can never hope to live within two Methuselahs of
Hector.
And, therefore, restless inquietude for the diuturnity of
10 our memories unto present considerations seems a vanity
almost out of date and superannuated piece of folly. We can-
not hope to live so long in our names as some have done in
their persons. One face of Janus holds no proportion unto
the other. 'Tis too late to be ambitious. The great muta-
15 tions of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our
designs. To extend our memories by monuments whose death
we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope without
injury to our expectations in the advent of the Last Day, were
a contradiction to our beliefs. We whose generations are or-
20 dained in this setting part of time are providentially taken
off from such imaginations; and, being necessitated to eye the
remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto
thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the
consideration of that duration which maketh pyramids pillars
25 of snow and all that
?
s past a moment.
Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the
mortal right-lined circle must conclude and shut up all.
There is no antidote against the opium of time, which tem-
porally considereth all things: our fathers find their graves
30 in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be
buried in our survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty
years. Generations pass while some trees stand, and old
families last not three oaks. To be read by bare inscriptions
like many in Gruter, to hope for eternity by enigmatical
35 epithets or first letters of our names, to be studied by anti-
quaries, who we were, and have new names given us like many
of the mummies, are cold consolations unto the students of
perpetuity, even by everlasting languages.

To be content that times to come should only know there
was such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him,
was a frigid ambition in Cardan, disparaging his horoscopal
inclination and judgment of himself. Who cares to subsist
like Hippocrates's patients, or Achilles's horses in Homer, 5
tinder naked nominations, without deserts and noble acts,
which are the balsam of our memories, the entelechia and soul
of our subsistences? To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds
an infamous history. The Canaanitish woman lives more
happily without a name than Herodias with one. And who 10
had not rather have been the good thief than Pilate?
But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy,
and deals with the memory of men without distinction to
merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the
pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana; 15
he is almost lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph
of Adrian's horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we
compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names,
since bad have equal durations and Thersites is like to live
as long as Agamemmon. Who knows whether the best of men 20
be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons
forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account
of time? Without the favor of the everlasting register, the
first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's
long life had been his only chronicle. 25
Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be con-
tent to be as though they had not been, to be found in the
register of God, not in the record of man. Twenty-seven
names make up the first story before the Flood, and the
recorded names ever since contain not one living century. 30
The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live.
The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows
when was the equinox? Every hour adds unto that current
arithmetic, which scarce stands one moment. And since
death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could 35
doubt whether thus to live were to die; since our longest sun
sets at right descensions and makes but winter arches, and
therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness

and have our light in ashes; since the brother of death daily
haunts us with dying mementos, and time., that grows old in
itself, bids us hope no long duration; diuturnity is a dream
and folly of expectation.
6 Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion
shares with memory a great part even of our living beings;
we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes
of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth
no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To
10 weep into stones are fables. Afflictions induce callosities;
miseries are slippery, or fall like snow upon us, which not-
withstanding is no unhappy stupidity. To be ignorant of
evils to come and forgetful of evils past is a merciful pro-
vision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few
15 and evil days, and, our delivered senses not relapsing into
cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the
edge of repetitions. A great part of antiquity contented
their hopes of subsistency with a transmigration of their souls
a good way to continue their memories, while, having the
20 advantage of plural successions, they could not but act some-
thing remarkable in such variety of beings, and, enjoying the
fame of their passed selves, make accumulation of glory unto
their last durations. Others, rather than be lost in the un-
comfortable night of nothing, were content to recede into the
25 common being and make one particle of the public soul of
all things, which was no more than to return into their un-
known and divine original again. Egyptian ingenuity was
more unsatisfied, contriving their bodies in sweet consist-
encies, to attend the return of their souls. But all was vanity,
30
feeding the wind, and folly. The Egyptian mummies, which
Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth.
Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and
Pharaoh is sold for balsams.
In vain do individuals hope for immortality or any patent
35 from oblivion, in preservations below the moon; men have
been deceived even in their flatteries, above the sun, and
studied conceits to perpetuate their names in heaven. The
various cosmography of that part hath already varied the

names of contrived constellations; Nimrod is lost in Orion,
and Osiris in the Dog-star. While we look for incorruption
in the heavens, we find they are but like the earth durable
in their main bodies, alterable in their parts; whereof, beside
comets and new stars, perspectives begin to tell tales, and the 5
spots that wander about the sun, with Phaeton's favor, would
make clear conviction.
There is nothing strictly immortal but immortality.
Whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end;
which is the peculiar of that necessary essence that cannot 10
destroy itself, and the highest strain of omnipotency, to be
so powerfully constituted as not to suffer even from the power
of itself: all others have a dependent being and within the
reach of destruction. But the sufficiency of Christian im-
mortality frustrates all earthly glory, and the quality of 15
either state, after death, makes a folly of posthumous memory.
God, Who can only destroy our souls and hath assured our
resurrection, either of our bodies or names hath directly
promised no duration. Wherein there is so much of chance
that the boldest expectants have found unhappy frustration; 20
and to hold long subsistence seems but a scape in oblivion.
But man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous
in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal
lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of
his nature. 25
Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within
us. A small fire suificeth for life; great flames seemed too
little after death, while men vainly affected precious pyres
and to burn like Sardanapalus: but the wisdom of funeral
laws found the folly of prodigal blazes, and reduced undoing 30
fires unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein few could be
so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a mourner, and an urn.
Five languages secured not the epitaph of Gordianus. The
man of God lives longer without a tomb than any by one, in-
visibly interred by angels and adjudged to obscurity, though 35
not without some marks directing human discovery. Enoch
and Elias, without either tomb or burial, in an anomalous
state of being, are the great examples of perpetuity, in their

long and living memory, in strict account being still on this
side death and having a late part yet to act upon this stage
of earth. If in the decretory term of the world we shall not
all die but be changed, according to received translation, the
6 Last Day will make but few graves; at least, quick resurrec-
tions will anticipate lasting sepultures. Some graves will be
opened before they be quite closed, and Lazarus be no wonder.
When many that feared to die shall groan that they can die
but once, the dismal state is the second and living death, when
10 life puts despair on the damned, when men shall wish the
coverings of mountains, not of monuments, and annihilations
shall be courted.
While some have studied monuments, others have studi-
ously declined them, and some have been so vainly boisterous
15 that they durst not acknowledge their graves; wherein
Alaricus seems most subtle, who had a river turned to hide
his bones at the bottom. Even Sylla, that thought himself
safe in his urn, could not prevent revenging tongues, and
stones thrown at his monument. Happy are they whom
20 privacy makes innocent, who deal so with men in this world
that they are not afraid to meet them in the next, who, when
they die, make no commotion among the dead, and are not
touched with that poetical taunt of Isaiah.
Pyramids, arches, obelisks were but the irregularities of
25 vain-glory, and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity. But
the most magnanimous resolution rests in the Christian re-
ligion, which trampleth upon pride and sits on the neck of
ambition, humbly pursuing that infallible perpetuity unto
which all others must diminish their diameters and be poorly
30 seen in angles of contingency.
Pious spirits who passed their days in raptures of futurity
made little more of this world than the world that was before
it, while they lay obscure in the chaos of pre-ordination and
night of their fore-beings. And if any have been so happy
35 as truly to understand Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolu-
tion, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gus-
tation of God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they
have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the

glory of the world is surely over, and the earth in ashes unto
them.
To subsist in lasting monuments, to live in their produc-
tions, to exist in their names and predicament of chimseras,
was large satisfaction unto old expectations, and made one 5 ,
part of their Elysiums. But all this is nothing in the meta-
physics of true belief. To live indeed is to be again our-
selves, which being not only an hope, but an evidence, in noble
believers, 'tis all one to lie in St. Innocent's churchyard as in
the sands of Egypt; ready to be anything, in the ecstasy of 10
being ever, and as content with six foot as the moles of
Adrianus.
. . .
" tabesne cadavera solvat,
An rogus, baud refert."
LUCAN. 15

3obn
1631-1700.
PEEFACE TO THE FABLES.
(1700.)
'Tis with a poet as with a man who designs to build, and
is very exact, as he supposes, in easting up the cost before-
hand; but, generally speaking, he is mistaken in his account,
and reckons short of the expense he first intended: he alters
5 his mind as the work proceeds, and will have this or that con-
venience more, of which he had not thought when he began.
So has it happened to me. I have built a house where I in-
tended but a lodge; yet with better success than a certain
nobleman, who, beginning with a dog-kennel, never lived to
10 finish the palace he had contrived.
From translating the first of Homer's Iliads (which I in-
tended as an essay to the whole work) I proceeded to the
translation of the twelfth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, be-
cause it contains, among other things, the causes, the begin-
15 ning, and ending of the Trojan War. Here I ought in reason
to have stopped; but the speeches of Ajax and Ulysses lying
next in my way, I could not balk them. When I had com-
passed them, I was so taken with the former part of the fif-
teenth book (which is the masterpiece of the whole Metamor-
20 phoses) that I enjoined myself the pleasing task of rendering
it into English. And now I found, by the number of my
verses, that they began to swell into a little volume; which
gave me an occasion of looking backward on some beauties
of my author, in his former books: there occurred to me the
25 Hunting of the Boar, Cinyras and Myrrha, the good-natured
story of Baucis and Philemon, with the rest, which I hope I
have translated closely enough, and given them the same
turn of verse which they had in the original; and this, I must
33

34 JOHN DEYDEN
say without vanity, is not the talent of every poet. He who has
arrived the nearest to it is the ingenious and learned Sandys,
the best versifier of the former age, if I may properly call it
by that name, which was the former part of this concluding
century. For Spenser and Fairfax both flourished in the 5
reign of Queen Elizabeth; great masters in our language, and
who saw much farther into the beauties of our numbers than
those who immediately followed them. Milton was the poet-
ical son of Spenser, and Mr. Waller of Fairfax, for we have
our lineal descents and clans as well as other families. 10
Spenser more than once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer
was transfused into his body, and that he was begotten by
him two hundred years after his decease. Milton has ac-
knowledged to me that Spenser was his original, and many
besides myself have heard our famous Waller own that he 15
derived the harmony of his numbers from the Godfrey of
Bulloigne, which was turned into English by Mr. Fairfax.
But to return. Having done with Ovid for this time, it
came into my mind that our old English poet, Chaucer, in
many things resembled him, and that with no disadvantage 20
on the side of the modern author, as I shall endeavor to prove
when I compare them; and as I am, and always have been,
studious to promote the honor of my native country, so I soon
resolved to put their merits to the trial by turning some of
the Canterbury Tales into our language as it is now refined; 25
for by this means, both the poets being set in the same light
and dressed in the same English habit, story to be compared
with story, a certain judgment may be made betwixt them
by the reader, without obtruding my opinion on him. Or if
I seem partial to my countryman, and predecessor in the 30
laurel, the friends of antiquity are not few; and besides many
of the learned^ Ovid has almost all the beaux, and the whole
fair sex, his declared patrons. Perhaps I have assumed
somewhat more to myself than they allow me, because I have
adventured to sum up the evidence; but the readers are the 35
jury, and their privilege remains entire, to decide according
to the merits of the cause, or, if they please, to bring it to
another hearing before some other court.

In the meantime, to follow the thread of my discourse (as
thoughts, according to Mr. Hobbes, have always some con-
nection), so from Chaucer I was led to think on Boccace, who
was not only his contemporary but also pursued the same
5 studies; wrote novels in prose, and many works in verse; par-
ticularly is said to have invented the octave rhyme, or stanza
of eight lines, which ever since has been maintained by the
practice of all Italian writers who are, or at least assume the
title of, heroic poets. He and Chaucer, among other things,
10 had this in common, that they refined their mother tongues;
but with this difference, that Dante had begun to file their
language, at least in verse, before the time of Boccace, who
likewise received no little help from his master, Petrarch.
But the reformation of their prose was wholly owing to Boc-
15 cace himself, who is yet the standard of purity in the Italian
tongue, though many of his phrases are become obsolete, as
in process of time it must needs happen. Chaucer (as you
have formerly been told by our learned Mr. Rymer) first
adorned and amplified our barren tongue from the Provencal,
20 which was then the most polished of all the modern lan-
guages; but this subject has been copiously treated by that
great critic, who deserves no little commendation from us
his countrymen. For these reasons of time and resemblance
of genius in Chaucer and Boccace, I resolved to join them in
25 my present work; to which I have added some original papers
of my own, which, whether they are equal or inferior to my
other poems, an author is the most improper judge, and
therefore I leave them wholly to the mercy of the reader. I
will hope the best, that they will not be condemned; but if
80 they should, I have the excuse of an old gentleman, who,
mounting on horseback before some ladies, when I was pres-
ent, got up somewhat heavily, but desired of the fair spec-
tators that they would count fourscore and eight before they
judged him. By the mercy of God I am already come within
35 twenty years of his number, a cripple in my limbs; but what
decays are in my mind the reader must determine. I think
myself as vigorous as ever in the faculties of my soul, ex-
cepting only my memory, which is not impaired to any great

36 JOHN DRYDEN
degree; and if I lose not more of it, I have no great reason
to complain. "What judgment I had increases rather than
diminishes; and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding
in so fast upon me that my only difficulty is to choose or to
reject, to run them into verse or to give them the other har- 5
mony of prose. I have so long studied and practised both
that they are grown into a habit and become familiar to me.
In short, though I may lawfully plead some part of the old
gentleman's excuse, yet I will reserve it till I think I have
greater need, and ask no grains of allowance for the faults 10
of this my present work but those which are given of course
to human frailty. I will not trouble my reader with the
shortness of time in which I writ it, or the several intervals
of sickness: they who think too well of their own performances
are apt to boast in their prefaces how little time their works 15
have cost them, and what other business of more importance
interfered; but the reader will be as apt to ask the question,
Why they allowed not a longer time to make their works
more perfect, and why they had so despicable an opinion of
their judges as to thrust their indigested stuff upon them, as 20
if they deserved no better.
With this account of my present undertaking, I conclude
the first part of this discourse: in the second part, as at a
second sitting, though I alter not the draught, I must touch
the same features over again and change the dead coloring 25
of the whole. In general, I will only say that I have written
nothing which savors of immorality or profaneness; at least,
I am not conscious to myself of any such intention. If there
happen to be found an irreverent expression or a thought too
wanton, they are crept into my verses through my inad-30
vertency; if the searchers find any in the cargo, let them be
staved or forfeited, like contrabanded goods; at least, let their
authors be answerable for them, as being but imported mer-
chandise and not of my own manufacture. On the other
side, I have endeavored to choose such fables, both ancient 35
and modern, as contain in each of them some instructive
moral; which I could prove by induction, but the way is
tedious, and they leap foremost into sight without the reader's

PEEFACE TO THE FABLES 37
trouble of looking after them. I wish I could affirm with a
safe conscience that I had taken the same care in all my
former writings; for it must be owned that, supposing verses
are never so beautiful or pleasing, yet if they contain any-
5 thing which shocks religion or good manners, they are at
best, what Horace says of good numbers without good sense
"Versus inopes rerum, nugseque canorae." Thus far, I hope,
I am right in court, without renouncing my other right of
self-defence where I have been wrongfully accused and my
10 sense wire-drawn into blasphemy or bawdry, as it has often
been by a religious lawyer- in a late pleading against the
stage, in which he mixes truth with falsehood, and has not
forgotten the old rule of calumniating strongly that some-
thing may remain.
15 I resume the. thrid of my discourse with the first of my
translations, which was the first Iliad of Homer. If it shall
please God to give me longer life and moderate health, my
intentions are to translate the whole Ilias, provided still that
I meet with those encouragements from the public which may
20 enable me to proceed in my undertaking with some cheerful-
ness. And this I dare assure the world beforehand, that I
have found by trial Homer a more pleasing task than Virgil,
though I say not the translation will be less laborious. For
the Grecian is more according to my genius than the Latin
25 poet. In the works of the two authors we may read their
manners and natural inclinations, which are wholly different.
Virgil was of a quiet, sedate temper; Homer was violent, im-
petuous, and full of fire. The chief talent of Virgil was
propriety of thoughts and ornament of words; Homer was
30 rapid in his thoughts, and took all the liberties, both of num-
bers and of expressions, which his language and the age in
which he lived allowed him. Homer's invention was more
copious, Virgil's more confined; so that if Homer had not
led the way, it was not in Virgil to have begun heroic poetry,
35 for nothing can be more evident than that the Eoman poem
is but the second part of the Ilias a continuation of the
same story, and the persons already formed; the manners of
are those of Hector superadded to those which Homer

38 JOHN DRYDEN
gave him. The adventures of Ulysses in the Odysseis are
imitated in the first six books of VirgiPs JEneis; and though
the accidents are not the same (which would have argued him
of a servile copying and total barrenness of invention), yet
the seas were the same in which both the heroes wandered, 5
and Dido cannot be denied to be the poetical daughter of
Calypso. The six latter books of VirgiPs poem are the four
and twenty Iliads contracted a quarrel occasioned by a lady,
a single combat, battles fought, and a town besieged. I say
not this in derogation to Virgil, neither do I contradict any- 10
thing which I have formerly said in his just praise: for his
episodes are almost wholly of his own invention; and the form
which he has given to the telling makes the tale his own, even
though the original story had been the same. But this proves,
however, that Homer taught Virgil to design; and if inven-15
tion be the first virtue of an epic poet, then the Latin poem
can only be allowed the second place. Mr. Hobbes, in the
preface to his own bald translation of the Ilias (studying
poetry, as he did mathematics, when it was too late), Mr.
Hobbes, I say, begins the praise of Homer where he should 20
have ended it. He tell us that the first beauty of an epic
poem consists in diction, that is, in the choice of words and
harmony of numbers. Now, the words are the coloring of
the work, which in the order of nature is last to be considered:
the design, the disposition, the manners, and the thoughts 25
are all before it; where any of those are wanting or imperfect,
so much wants or is imperfect in the imitation of human life,
which is in the very definition of a poem. Words indeed,
like glaring colors, are the first beauties that arise and strike
the sight; but if the draught be false or lame, the figures ill- 30
disposed, the manners obscure or inconsistent, or the thoughts
unnatural, then the finest colors are but daubing, and the
piece is a beautiful monster at the best. Neither Virgil nor
Homer were deficient in any of the former beauties; but in
this last, which is expression, the Roman poet is at least equal 35
to the Grecian, as I have said elsewhere, supplying the pov-
erty of his language by his musical ear and by his diligence.
But to return: our two great poets, being so different in their

tempers, one choleric and sanguine, the other phlegmatic and
melancholic, that which makes them excel in their several
ways is that each of them has followed his own natural in-
clination, as well in forming the design as in the execution of
5 it. The very heroes show their authors: Achilles is hot, im-
patient, revengeful
"
Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer,"
etc.; ^Eneas, patient, considerate, careful of his people and
merciful to his enemies, ever submissive to the will of Heaven
"quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur." I could
10 please myself with enlarging on this subject, but am forced
to defer it to a fitter time. From all I have said I will only
draw this inference, that the action of Homer being more
full of vigor than that of Virgil, according to the temper of
the writer, is of consequence more pleasing to the reader.
15 One warms you by degrees; the other sets you on fire all
at once, and never intermits his heat. 'Tis the same differ-
ence which Longinus makes betwixt the effects of eloquence in
Demosthenes and Tully. One persuades, the other commands.
You never cool while you read Homer, even not in the second
20 book (a graceful flattery to his countrymen); but he hastens
from the ships, and concludes not that book till he has made
you an amends by the violent playing of a new machine.
From thence he hurries on his action with variety of events,
and ends it in less compass than two months. This ve-
25 hemence of his, I confess, is more suitable to my temper, and
therefore I have translated his first book with greater pleasure
than any part of Virgil; but it was not a pleasure without
pains: the continual agitations of the spirits must needs be
a weakening of any constitution, especially in age; and many
30 pauses are required for refreshment betwixt the heats, the
Iliad of itself being a third part longer than all Virgil's
works together.
This is what I thought needful in this place to say of
Homer. I proceed to Ovid and Chaucer, considering the
35 former only in relation to the latter. With Ovid ended the
golden age of the Roman tongue; from Chaucer the purity
of the English tongue began. The manners of the poets were
not unlike: both of them were well-bred, well-natured,

40 JOHN DEYDEN
amorous, and libertine at least in their writings, 'it may be
also in their lives. Their studies were the same, philosophy
and philology. Both of them were knowing in astronomy,
of which Ovid's books of the Eoman feasts and Chaucer's
treatise of the astrolabe are sufficient witnesses; but Chaucer 5
was likewise an astrologer, as were Virgil, Horace, Persius,
and Manilius. Both writ with wonderful facility and clear-
ness: neither were great inventors; for Ovid only copied the
Grecian fables, and most of Chaucer's stories were taken from
his Italian contemporaries or their predecessors. Boccace his iO
Decameron was first published, and from thence our English-
man has borrowed many of his Canterbury Tales; yet that of
Palamon and Arcite was written in all probability by some
Italian wit in a former age, as I shall prove hereafter. The
tale of Grizild was the invention of Petrarch, by him sent to 15
Boccace, from whom it came to Chaucer. Troilus and Ores-
sida was also written by a Lombard author, but much am-
plified by our English translator, as well as beautified, the
genius of our countrymen in general being rather to improve
an invention than to invent themselves, as is evident, not only 20
in our poetry, but in many of our manufactures. I find I
have anticipated already, and taken up from Boccace before
I come to him; but there is so much less behind, and I am of
the temper of most kings, who love to be in debt, are all for
present money, no matter how they pay it afterwards; besides, 25
the nature of a preface is rambling, never wholly out of the
way nor in it. This I have learnt from the practice of honest
Montaigne; and return at my pleasure to Ovid and Chaucer,
of whom I have little more to say. Both of them built on
the inventions of other men; yet since Chaucer had something 30
of his own, as The Wife of Bath's Tale, The Cock and the
Fox, which I have translated, and some others, I may justly
give our countryman the precedence in that part, since I can
remember nothing of Ovid which was wholly his. Both of
them understood the manners, under which name I compre-35
hend the passions and in a larger sense the descriptions of
persons and their very habits. For an example, I see Baucis
and Philemon as perfectly before me as if some ancient

painter had drawn them; and all the pilgrims in the Canter-
bury Tales, their humors, their features, and the very dress,
as distinctly as if I had supped with them at the Tabard in
Southwark: yet even there too the figures in Chaucer are
5 much more lively and set in a better light, which, though I
have not time to prove, yet I appeal to the reader, and am
sure he will clear me from partiality. The thoughts and
words remain to be considered in the comparison of the two
poets: and I have saved myself one half of that labor by
10 owning that Ovid lived when the Roman tongue was in its
meridian, Chaucer in the dawning of our language; therefore
that part of the comparison stands not on an equal foot, any
more than the diction of Ennius and Ovid, or of Chaucer and
our present English. The words are given up as a post not
15 to be defended in our poet, because he wanted the modern
art of fortifying. The thoughts remain to be considered, and
they are to be measured only by their propriety, that is, as they
flow more or less naturally from the- persons described, on such
and such occasions. The vulgar judges, which are nine parts
20 in ten of all nations, who call conceits and jingles wit, who
see Ovid full of them and Chaucer altogether without them,
will think me little less than mad for preferring the English-
man to the Roman; yet, with their leave, I must presume to
say that the things they admire are only glittering trifles,
25 and so far from being witty that in a serious poem they are
nauseous because they are unnatural. Would any man who
is ready to die for love describe his passion like Narcissus?
Would he think of
"
inopem me copia fecit," and a dozen
more of such expressions, poured on the neck of one another
30 and signifying all the same thing? If this were wit, was this
a time to be witty, when the poor wretch was in the agony of
death? This is just John Littlewit in Bartholomew Fair,
who had a conceit (as he tells you) left him in his misery;
a miserable conceit. On these occasions the poet should en-
35 deavor to raise pity; but, instead of this, Ovid is tickling you
to laugh. Virgil never made use of such machines when he
was moving you to commiserate the death of Dido : he would
not destroy what he was building. Chaucer makes Arcite

42 JOHN DRYDEN"
violent in his love and unjust in the pursuit of it; yet when
he came to die he made him think more reasonably: he re-
pents not of his love, for that had altered his character, but
acknowledges the injustice of his proceedings and resigns
Emilia to Palamon. What would Ovid have done on this 5
occasion? He would certainly have made Arcite witty on his
death-bed: he had complained he was farther off from pos-
session by being so near, and a thousand such boyisms, which
Chaucer rejected as below the dignity of the subject. They
who think otherwise would, by the same reason, prefer Lucan 10
and Ovid to Homer and Virgil, and Martial to all four of
them. As for the turn of words, in which Ovid particularly
excels all poets, they are sometimes a fault and sometimes
a beauty, as they are used properly or improperly, but in
strong passions always to be shunned, because passions are 15
serious and will admit no playing. The French have a high
value for them, and I confess they are often what they call
delicate when they are introduced with judgment; but Chau-
cer writ with more simplicity, and followed nature more
closely, than to use them. 20
I have thus far, to the best of my knowledge, been an up-
right judge betwixt the parties in competition, not meddling
with the design or the disposition of it, because the design
was not their own and in the disposing of it they were equal.
It remains that I say somewhat of Chaucer in particular. 25
In the first place, as he is the father of English poetry, so
I hold him in the same degree of veneration as the Grecians
held Homer or the Eomans Virgil. He is a perpetual foun-
tain of good sense, learned in all sciences, and therefore
speaks properly on all subjects. As he knew what to say, so 30
he knows when to leave off; a continence which is practised
by few writers, and scarcely by any of the ancients, excepting
Virgil and Horace. One of our late great poets is sunk in
his reputation because he could never forego any conceit
which came in his way, but swept, like a drag-net, great and 35
small. There was plenty enough, but the dishes were ill
sorted; whole pyramids of sweetmeats for boys and women,
but little of solid meat for men. All this proceeded, not

PEEFACE TO THE FABLES 43
from any want of knowledge, but of judgment. Neither did
he want that in discerning the beauties and faults of other
poets, but only indulged himself in the luxury of writing;
and perhaps knew it was a fault but hoped the reader would
5 not find it. For this reason, though he must always be
thought a great poet, he is no longer esteemed a good writer;
and for ten impressions, which his works have had in so many
successive years, yet at present a hundred books are scarcely
purchased once a twelvemonth; for, as my last Lord Eochester
10 said, though somewhat profanely,
" Not being of God, he
could not stand."
Chaucer followed nature everywhere, but was never so bold
to go beyond her, and there is a great difference of being
poeta and nimis poeta; if we believe Catullus, as much as
15 betwixt a modest behavior and affectation. The verse of
Chaucer, I confess, is not harmonious to us; but is like the
eloquence of one whom Tacitus commends, it was "auribus
istius temporis accommodata": they who lived with him,
and some time after him, thought it musical; and it continues
20 so even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers of
Lydgate and Gower, his contemporaries; there is the rude
sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing
though not perfect. 'Tis true I cannot go so far as he who
published the last edition of him, for he would make us be-
25 lieve the fault is in our ears, and that there were really ten
syllables in a verse where we find but nine; but this opinion
is not worth confuting; it is so gross and obvious an error
that common sense (which is a rule in everything but matters
of faith and revelation) must convince the reader that equal-
30 ity of numbers in every verse which we call heroic was
either not known or not always practised in Chaucer's age.
It were an easy matter to produce some thousands of his
verses which are lame for want of half a foot and sometimes
a whole one, and which no pronunciation can make otherwise.
35 We can only say that he lived in the infancy of our poetry,
and that nothing is brought to perfection at the first. We
must be children before we grow men. There was an Ennius,
and in process of time a Lucilius and a Lucretius, before

44 JOHN DRYDEN
Virgil and Horace; even after Chaucer there was a Spenser, a
Harrington, a Fairfax, before Waller and Denham were in
being, and our numbers were in their nonage till these last
appeared. I need say little of his parentage, life, and for-
tunes: they are to be found at large in all the editions of 5
his works. He was employed abroad, and favored by Edward
the Third, Richard the Second, and Henry .the Fourth, and
was poet, as I suppose, to all three of them. In Richard's
time, I doubt, he was a little dipped in the rebellion of the
Commons; and, being brother-in-law to John of Gaunt, it 10
was no wonder if he followed the fortunes of that family, and
was well with Henry the Fourth when he had deposed his
predecessor. Neither is it to be admired that Henry, who
was a wise as well as a valiant prince, who claimed by suc-
cession, and was sensible that his title was not sound but was 15
rightfully in Mortimer, who had married the heir of York
it was not to be admired, I say, if that great politician should
be pleased to have the greatest wit of those times in his in-
terests and to be the trumpet of his praises. Augustus had
given him the example, by the advice of Maecenas, who rec-20
ommended Virgil and Horace to him; whose praises helped
to make him popular while he was alive, and after his death
have made him precious to posterity. As for the religion of
our poet, he seems to have some little bias towards the opin-
ions of Wiclif, after John of Gaunt his patron; somewhat 25
of which appears in the tale of Piers Plowman; yet I cannot
blame him for inveighing so sharply against the vices of the
clergy in his age: their pride, their ambition, their pomp,
their avarice, their worldly interest deserved the lashes which
he gave them, both in that and in most of his Canterbury 30
Tales. Neither has his contemporary Boccace spared them.
Yet both those poets lived in much esteem with good and
holy men in orders; for the scandal which is given by par-
ticular priests reflects not on the sacred function: Chaucer's
Monk, his Canon, and his Friar took not from the character 35
of his Good Parson. A satirical poet is the check of the
laymen on bad priests. We are only to take care that we
involve not the innocent with the guilty in the same con-

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