Hampton-Court he was pleased to command me to stay privately at London, to send to him and receive from him all his letters from and to all his correspondents at home and abroad; and I was furnished with nine several ciphers in order to it; which trust I performed with great safety to the persons with whom we corresponded: but about nine months after, being discovered by their knowledge of Mr. Cowley's hand, I happily escaped, both for myself and those that held correspondence with me. That time was too hot and busy for such idle speculations: but after I had the good fortune to wait upon your Majesty in Holland and France, you were pleased sometimes to give me arguments to divert and put off the evil hours of our banishment, which now and then fell not short of your Majesty's expectation.

After, when your Majesty, departing from St. Germains to Jersey, was pleased freely (without my asking) to confer upon me that place wherein I have now the honour to serve you, I then gave over poetical lines, and made it my business to draw such others as might be more serviceable to your Majesty, and I hope more lasting. Since that time I never disobeyed my old master's commands till this summer at the Wells, my retirement there tempting me to divert those melancholy thoughts which the new apparitions of foreign invasion and domestic discontent gave us: but these clouds being now happily blown over, and our sun clearly shining out again, I have recovered the relapse, it being suspected that it would have proved the epidemical disease of age, which is apt to fall back into the follies of youth: yet Socrates, Aristotle, and Cato, did the same ; and Scaliger saith, that fragment of Aristotle was beyond any thing that Pindar or Homer ever wrote. I will not call this a Dedication, for those epistles are commonly greater absurdities that any that come after; for what author can reasonably believe that fixing the great name of some eminent patron in the forehead of his book can charm away censure, and that the first leaf should be a curtain to draw over and hide all the deformities that stand behindit? neither have I any need of such shifts, for most of the parts of this body have already had your Majesty's view; and having past the test of so clear and sharp-sighted a judgment, which has as good a title to give law in matters of this nature as in any other, they who shall presume to dissent from your Majesty will do more wrong to their own judginent than their judgment can do to me: and for those latter parts which have not yet received your Majesty's favourable aspect, if they who have seen them do not flatter me, (for I dare not trust my own judgment) they will make it appear that it is not with me as with most of mankind, who never forsake their darling vices till their vices forsake them; and that this divorce was not frigiditatis causa, but an act of choice, and not of necessity. Therefore, Sir, I shall only call it an Humble Petition that your Majesty will please to pardon this new amour to my old mistress, and my disobedience to his commands to whose memory I look up with great reverence and devotion: and making a serious reflection upon that wise advice, it carries much greater weight with it now than when it was given; for when age and experience has so ripened man's discretion as to make it fit for use, either in private or public affairs, nothing blasts and corrupts the fruit of it so much as the empty airy reputation of being nimis poëta; and therefore I shall take my leave of the Muses, as two of my predecessors did, saying,

"Splendidis longum valedico nugis.
"Hic versus et caetera ludicra pono."

Your Majesty's most faithful

and loyal subject, and most
dutiful and devoted servant,

JO. DENHAM.

MISCELLANIES.

COOPER'S HILL.

SURE there are poets which did never dream
Upon Parnassus, nor did taste the stream
Of Helicon; we therefore may suppose
Those made not poets, but the poets those.
And as courts make not kings, but kings the court,
So where the Muses and their train resort

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Parnassus stands; if I can be to thee
A poet, thou Parnassus art to me.
Nor wonder if (advantag'd in my flight,
By taking wing from thy auspicious height)
Thro' untrac'd ways and airy paths I fly,
More boundless in my fancy than my eye;
My eye, which swift as thought contracts the space
That lies between, and first salutes the place
Crown'd with that sacred pile, so vast, so high, 15
That whether 'tis a part of earth or sky
Uncertain seems, and may be thought a proud
Aspiring mountain, or descending cloud;
Paul's, the late theme of such a Muse *, whose flight
Has bravely reach'd and soar'd above thy height; 20
Now shalt thou stand, tho' sword, or time, or fire,
Or zeal, more fierce than they, thy fall conspire,
Secure, whilst thee the best of poets sings,
Preserv'd from ruin by the best of kings.

Under his proud survey the City lies,
And like a mist beneath a hill doth rise,

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Whose state and wealth, the bus'ness and the crowd,
Seems at this distance but a darker cloud,
And is, to him who rightly things esteems,
No other in effect than what it seems;
Where with like haste, tho' several ways, they run,
Some to undo, and some to be undone;
While luxury and wealth, like war and peace,

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Are each the other's ruin and increase;
As rivers lost in seas, some secret vein
Thence reconveys, there to be lost again.
Oh! happiness of sweet retir'd content!
To be at once secure and innocent.

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Windsor the next (where Mars with Venus dwells,
Beauty with strength) above the valley swells
Into my eye, and doth itself present
With such an easy and unforc'd ascent,
That no stupendous precipice denies
Access, no horror turns away our eyes;
But such a rise as doth at once invite
A pleasure and a rev'rence from the sight:
Thy mighty master's emblem, in whose face
Sat meekness, heighten'd with majestic grace;
Such seems thy gentle height, made only proud
To be the basis of that pompous load.
Than which a nobler weight no mountain bears,
But Atlas only, which supports the spheres.

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