time to a right of judging. But to press it yet
farther, there are many witty men, but few poets;
neither have all poets a taste of tragedy; and this
is the rock on which they are daily splitting.
Poetry, which is a picture of Nature, must gene-
rally please; but it is not to be understood that
all
parts of it must please every man; therefore is
not tragedy to be judged by a witty man, whose
taste is only confined to comedy. Nor is every
man who loves tragedy a sufficient judge of it: he
must understand the excellencies of it too, or he
will only prove a blind admirer, not a critick.
From hence it comes that so many satires on
poets, and censures of their writings, fly abroad.
Men of pleasant conversation, (at least esteemed
so,) and endued with a trifling kind of fancy, per-
haps helped out with some smattering of Latin,
are ambitious to distinguish themselves from the
herd of gentlemen by their poetry:

Rarus enim fermè sensus communis in illâ
Fortuna.

And is not this a wretched affectation, not to be contented with what Fortune has done for them, and sit down quietly with their estates, but they must call their wits in question, and needlessly expose their nakedness to publick view? Not considering that they are not to expect the same approbation from sober men, which they have found from their flatterers after the third bottle. If a little glittering in discourse has passed them on us for witty men, where was the necessity of unde

ceiving the world? Would a man who has an ill title to an estate, but yet is in possession of it, would he bring it of his own accord to be tried at Westminster? We who write, if we want the talent, yet have the excuse that we do it for a poor subsistence; but what can be urged in their defence, who, not having the vocation of poverty to scribble, out of mere wantonness take pains to make themselves ridiculous? Horace was certainly in the right, where he said, that no man is satisfied with his own condition. A poet is not pleased because he is not rich, and the rich are discontented because the poets will not admit them of their number. Thus the case is hard with writers: if they succeed not, they must starve; and if they do, some malicious satire is prepared to level them, for daring to please without their leave.* But while they are so eager to destroy the fame of others, their ambition is manifest in their concernment; some poem of their own is to be produced, and the slaves are to be laid flat with their faces on the ground, that the monarch may appear in the greater majesty.

Dionysius and Nero had the same longings, but with all their power they could never bring their business well about. It is true, they proclaimed themselves poets by sound of trumpet; and poets they were, upon pain of death to any man who durst call them otherwise. The audience had a

* i. e. without the leave of the rich.

fine time on't, you may imagine; they sat in a bodily fear, and looked as demurely as they could : for it was a hanging matter to laugh unseasonably; and the tyrants were suspicious, as they had reason, that their subjects had them in the wind; so every man in his own defence set as good a face upon the business as he could. It was known beforehand that the monarchs were to be crowned laureats; but when the shew was over, and an honest man was suffered to depart quietly, he took out his laughter which he had stifled, with a firm resolution never more to see an emperor's play, though he had been ten years a making it. In the mean time, the true poets were they who made the best markets, for they had wit enough to yield the prize with a good grace, and not contend with him who had thirty legions. They were sure to be rewarded, if they confessed themselves bad writers; and that was somewhat better

+ This colloquial vulgarism, [on it, for of it,] which was common in the last age, is now seldom heard but from the mouths of the illiterate.

• Pope perhaps had this passage in his thoughts when he wrote,

J

"To laugh, were want of goodness and of grace,
"And to be grave, exceeds all power of face:

"I sit with sad civility,-1 read

"With honest anguish and an aching head."

• Our author appears to have had in his thoughts one of Bacon's APOPHTHEGMS, to which he has alluded in another place. (See vol. i. p. 157.) "There was a philosopher

in his Jeon for the story. to

Barclay in
ingenios

An

hum

than to be martyrs for their reputation. Lucan's example was enough to teach them manners; and after he was put to death for overcoming Nero, the emperor carried it without dispute for the best poet in his dominions: no man was ambitious of that grinning honour; for if he heard the malicious trumpeter proclaiming his name before his betters, he knew there was but one way with him.* Mæcenas took another course, and we know he was more than a great man, for he was witty too; but finding himself far gone in poetry, which Seneca assures us was not his talent, he thought it his best way to be well with Virgil and with Horace, that at least he might be a poet at the second hand; and we see how happily it has succeeded with him; for his own bad poetry is forgotten, and their panegyricks of him still remain. But they who should be our patrons are for no such expensive ways to fame; they have much of the poetry of Mæcenas, but little of his liberality. They are for persecuting Horace and Virgil, in the persons of their successors; for such is every

that disputed with Adrian, the emperor, and did it but weakly. One of his friends that had been by, afterwards said to him, "Methinks you were not like yourself, last day, in argument with the emperor : I could have answered better myself." "Why, (said the philosopher,) would you have me contend with him that commands thirty legions?"

* That he must lose his life.-The phrase in the text is as old as Shakspeare's time. See Mrs. Quickly's account of Falstaff's death.

man who has any part of their soul and fire, though in a less degree. Some of their little zanies' yet go farther, for they are persecutors even of Horace himself, as far as they are able, by their'ignorant

To the foregoing invective against great men, who "not having the vocation of poverty to scribble, out of mere wantonness take pains to make themselves ridicu lous," our author's quarrel with Rochester, I believe, gave rise. Previous to the publication of this Preface, and probably in the same year, (1678,) that nobleman's Imitation of the tenth Satire of the first Book of Horace had been printed anonymously; in which is no very favourable character of Dryden. He however, it appears, either did not know that it was written by Rochester, or chose to ascribe it to one of his zanies, whose name we must endeavour to discover by the aid of those lights which the literary history of the time affords. Shadwell he could not have had in contemplation; for he evidently considered the poet whose character as a dramatist is given in the performance alluded to, and the writer of the Imitation, as two distinct persons. See the next note.Besides ; Shadwell and our author were now on good terms, as appears by his furnishing Shadwell early in the following year with a Prologue to his TRUE WIDOW. I believe he supposed this Satire to have been the production "of starch'd Johnny Crown," as he is called in one of the lampoons of the time; who, as well as Settle, had been set up as a rival to Dryden, and whose masque of CALISTO having been acted at court in 1675, under the patronage of Lord Rochester, was a source of much uneasiness and discontent to our author. The "personators" in this piece were the Lady Mary and Lady Anne, daughters of the Duke of York, (each of whom afterwards sat on the English throne,) Lady Harriet Wentworth, Mrs. Jen