How's this, you cry? an actor write? we know it;
But Shakespeare was an actor and a poet.
Has not great Jonson's learning often fail'd:
But Shakespeare's greater genius still prevail'd.
Have not some writing actors, in this age,
Deserv'd and found success upon the stage ?
To tell the truth, when our old wits are tir'd,
Not one of us but means to be inspir'd.
Let your kind presence grace our homely cheer;
Peace and the butt is all our business here:
So much for that; and the devil take small beer.

PROLOGUE TO KING ARTHUR,
SPOKEN BY MR. BETTERTON.
SURE there's a dearth of wit in this dull town,
When silly plays so savourily go down;
As when clipt money passes, 't is a sign
A nation is not over-stock'd with coin.
Happy is he who, in his own defence,

Can write just level to your humble sense;
Who higher than your pitch can never go;
And, doubtless, he must creep, who writes
below.

So have I seen, in hall of knight, or lord,
A weak arm throw on a long shovel-board;
He barely lays his piece, bar rubs and knocks
Secur'd by weakness not to reach the box.
A feeble poet will his business do,
Who, straining all he can, comes up to you:
For, if you like yourselves, you like him too.
An ape his own dear image will embrace;
An ugly beau adores a hatchet face :
So, some of you, on pure instinct of nature,
Are led, by kind, to admire your fellow creature.
In fear of which, our house has sent this day,
To insure our new-built vessel, call'd a play;
No sooner nam'd than one cries out, These
stagers
[wagers.

Come in good time, to make more work for
The town divides, if it will take or no ;
The courtiers bet, the cits, the merchants too;
A sign they have but little else to do. [wise,
Bets, at the first, were fool-traps; where the
Like spiders, lay in ambush for the flies:
But now they're grown a common trade for all,
And actions by the new-book rise and fall;
Wits, cheats, and fops, are free of wager-hall.
One policy as far as Lyons carries ;
Another, nearer home, sets up for Paris.
Our bets, at last, would e'en to Rome extend,
But that the pope has prov'd our trusty friend,
Indeed, it were a bargain worth our money,
Could we insure another Ottoboni.
Among the rest there are a sharping set,
That pray for us, and yet against us bet,

EPILOGUE TO HENRY II.

BY MR. MOUNTFORT, 1693. SPOKEN BY MRS.

BRACEGIRDLE.

[say,

THUS you the sad catastrophe have seen,
Occasion'd by a mistress and a queen.
Queen Eleanor the proud was French, they
But English manufacture got the day.
Jane Clifford was her name, as books aver:
Fair Rosamond was but her Nom de guerre.
Now tell me, gallants, would you lead your life
With such a mistress, or with such a wife?
If one must be your choice, which d'ye approve
The curtain lecture, or the curtain love?
Would ye
be godly with perpetual, strife,
Still drudging on with homely Joan your wife;
Or take your pleasure in a wicked way,
Like honest loving Harry in the play?

I guess your minds: the mistress would be taken,*

And nauseous matrimony sent a packing.
The devil's in you all; mankind's a rogue;
You love the bride, but you detest the clog.
After a year, poor spouse is left i' th' lurch,
And you, like Haynes, return to mother-church
Or, if the name of Church comes cross your
mind,

Chapels of ease behind our scenes you find.
The playhouse is a kind of market place;
One chaffers for a voice, another for a face:
Nay, some of you, I dare not say how many,
Would buy of me a pen'worth for your penny.
E'en this poor face, which with my fan I hide,
Would make a shift my portion to provide,
With some small perquisites I have beside.

-the mistress would be taken, And nauseous matrimony sent a packing.] The incident of Lady Easy's throwing her handkerchief over Sir Charles's head, whilst he was sleeping, seems to have been taken from the Memoirs of Bassompiere, concerning a Count d'Orgevillier and his mistress. tom. ii. p. 6. 1728. at Amsterdam. Dr. J. W.

Though for your love, perhaps, I should not care, I could not hate a man that bids me fair.

For should you letters of reprisal seal,

These men write that which no man else would steal.

PROLOGUE TO ALBUMAZAR.

To say, this comedy pleased long ago,
Is not enough to make it pass you now.
Yet, gentlemen, your ancestors had wit;
When few men censur'd, and when fewer writ.
And Jonson, of those few the best, chose this,
As the best model of his masterpiece.
Subtle was got by our Albumazar,
That Alchymist by this Astrologer;
Here he was fashion'd, and we may suppose
He lik'd the fashion well, who wore the clothes.
But Ben made nobly his what he did mould;
What was another's lead becomes his gold:
Like an unrighteous conqueror he reigns,
Yet rules that well, which he unjustly gains.
But this our age such authors does afford,
As make whole plays, and yet scarce write one

Who, in this anarchy of wit, rob all, [word:
And what's their plunder, their possession call:
Who, like bold padders, scorn by night to prey,
But rob by sunshine, in the face of day:
Nay scarce the common ceremony use
Of, Stand, Sir, and deliver up your Muse;
But knock the Poet down, and, with a grace,
Mount Pegasus before the author's face.
Faith, if you have such country Toms abroad,
'T is time for all true men to leave that road.
Yet it were modest, could it but be said,
They strip the living, but these rob the dead;
Dare with the mummies of the Muses play,
And make love to them the Egyptian way;
Or, as a rhyming author would have said,
Join the dead living to the living dead.
Such men in Poetry may claim some part:
They have the license, though they want the art;
And might, where theft was prais'd, for
Laureats stand,
Poets, not of the head, but of the hand.
They make the benefits of others' studying,
Much like the meals of politic Jack-Pudding,
Whose dish to challenge no man has the cour-
[porridge.
age;

'T is all his own, when once he has spit i' the
But, gentlemen, you're all concern'd in this ;
You are in fault for what they do amiss :
For they their thefts still undiscover'd think,
And durst not steal, unless you please to wink.
Perhaps, you may award by your decree,
They should refund; but that can never be.

AN EPILOGUE.

You saw our wife was chaste, yet thoroughly

tried,

And, without doubt, you 're hugely edified;
For, like our hero, whom we show'd to-day,
You think no woman true, but in a play.
Love once did make a pretty kind of show:
Esteem and kindness in one breast would,
grow:
But 't was Heaven knows how many years ago.
Now some small chat, and guinea expectation,
Gets all the pretty creatures in the nation:
In comedy your little selves you meet;

'T is Covent Garden drawn in Bridges street.

chase:

Pinch you but in one vice, away you fly [pace.

She puffs, and hardly keeps your Protean vices

To some new frisk of contrariety.
You roll like snowballs, gathering as you run,
And get seven devils, when dispossess'd of one.
Your Venus once was a Platonic queen;
Nothing of love beside the face was seen;
But every inch of her you now uncase,
And clap a vizard-mask upon the face.
For sins like these, the zealous of the land,
With little hair, and little or no band,
Declare how circulating pestilences
Watch, every twenty years, to snap offences.
Saturn, e'en now, takes doctoral degrees;
He'll do your work this summer without fees.
Let all the boxes, Phoebus, find thy grace,
And, ah, preserve the eighteen penny place!
But for the pit confounders, let 'em go,
And find as little mercy as they show :
The Actors thus and thus thy Poets pray:
For every critic sav'd, thou damn'st a play.

EPILOGUE TO THE HUSBAND HIS OWN CUCKOLD.*

LIKE some raw sophister that mounts the pulpit, So trembles a young Poet at a full pit.

• This comedy was written by John Dryden, jun., our author's second son. It was acted at the theatre in Lincoln's-inn-fields, in 1696. D.

Unus'd to crowds, the person quakes for fear, And wonders how the devil he durst come

there;

Wanting three talents needful for the place, Some beard, some learning, and some little grace:

Nor is the puny Poet void of care;
For authors, such as our new authors are,
Have not much learning, nor much wit to
spare:

And as for grace, to tell the truth, there's scarce

one

But has as little as the very Parson :

Both say, they preach and write for your instruction:

But 't is for a third day, and for induction.
The difference is, that though you like the play,
The poet's gain is ne'er beyond his day.*
But with the Parson 't is another case,
He, without holiness, may rise to grace;
The Poet has one disadvantage more,
That if his play be dull, he's damn'd all o'er,
Not only a damn'd blockhead, but damn'd poor.
But dulness well becomes the sable garment;
I warrant that ne'er spoil'd a Priest's prefer-

ment:

Wit's not his business, and as wit now goes,
Sirs, 't is not so much yours as you suppose,
For you like nothing now but nauseous beaux.
You laugh not, gallants, as by proof appears,
At what his beauship says, but what he wears;
So 't is your eyes are tickled, not your ears:
The tailor and the furrier find the stuff,
The wit lies in the dress, and monstrous muff.
The truth on't is, the payment of the pit
Is like for like, clip money for clip wit.
You cannot from our absent author hope,
He should equip the stage with such a fop:
Fools change in England, and new fools arise,
For though the immortal species never dies,
Yet every year new maggots make new flies.
But where he lives abroad, he scarce can find
One fool, for million that he left behind.

• The poets gain is ne'er beyond his day] Dryden did not receive for his plays from the book seller above 552. The third night brought about 70%. The dedication five or ten guineas perhaps. Tonson paid Sir Richard Steel for Addison's Drummer, 502. 1715. And Dr. Young received 50l. for his Revenge. 7121. Southerene, for his Spartan Dame, in 1722, had 120, and now it is 100l. and 150. There were -plays on Sundays till the third year of Charles the First's reign. Otway had but one benefit for the play. Southerne was the first who had two benefits from a new representation. Farquhar had three for the Constant Couple in 1700. Three of Ben Jonson's plays, Sejanus, Cataline, and the New Inne, and two of Beaumont and Fletcher's, viz. The Faithful Shepherdess, and the Knight of the Burning Pestle, were damned the first night. Even the Silent wordan had like to have been condemned. Dr. J. W.

PROLOGUE TO THE PILGRIM.*

REVIVED FOR OUR AUTHOR'S BENEFIT, ANNO. 1700.

How wretched is the fate of those who write!
Brought muzzled to the stage, for fear they bite.
Where, like Tom Dove, they stand the com-
mon foe;

Lugg'd by the critic, baited by the beau.
Yet worse,
their brother poets damn the Play
And roar the loudest, though they never pay.
The fops are proud of scandal, for they cry,
At every lewd, low character-That's I.
He, who writes letters to himself, would swear
The world forgot him, if he was not there.
What should a Poet do? 'T is hard for one
To pleasure all the fools that would be shown:
And yet not two in ten will pass the town.
Most coxcombs are not of the laughing kind;
More goes to make a fop than fops can find.

[grees

Quack Maurus, though he never took deIn either of our universities; Yet to be shown by some kind wit he looks, Because he play'd the fool, and writ three books. But, if he would be worth a Poet's pen. He must be more a fool, and write again : For all the former fustian stuff he wrote Was dead-born doggerel, or is quite forgot; His man of Uz, stript of his Hebrew robe, Is just the proverb, and As poor as Job One would have thought he could no longer jog; But Arthur was a level, Job's a bog. There, though he crept, yet still he kept in sight; But here, he founders in, and sinks downright. Had he prepar'd us, and been dull by rule, Tobit had first been turn'd to ridicule : But our bold Briton, without fear or awe, O'erleaps at once the whole Apocrypha; [room Invades the Psalms with rhymes, and leaves no For any Vandal Hopkins yet to come.

But when, if after all, this godly geer Is not so senseless as it would appear; Our mountebank has laid a deeper train, His cant, like Merry Andrew's noble vein, Catcalls the sects to draw 'em in again. At leisure hours, in epic song he deals, Writes to the rumbling of his coach's wheels, Prescribes in haste, and seldom kills by rule, But rides triumphant between stool and stool.

This play, with alterations by Sir John Vanbrugh, and a secular masque, together with this prologue and an epilogue written by our author, was revived for his benefit in 1700, his fortune being at that time in as declining a state as his health; they were both spoken by Mr. Cibber, then a very young actor, much to Dryden's satisfac tion. D

Well, let him go; 't is yet too early day, To get himself a place in farce or play. [him, We know not by what name we should arraign For no one category can contain him; A pedant, canting preacher, and a quack, Are load enough to break one ass's back : At last grown wanton, he presum'd to write, Traduc'd two kings, their kindness to requite: One made the doctor, and one dubb'd the knight.

What would you say, if we should first begin
To stop the trade of love behind the scene:
Where actresses make bold with married men?
For while abroad so prodigal the dolt is,
Poor spouse at home as ragged as a colt is.
In short, we'll grow as moral as we can,
Save here and there a woman or a man:
But neither you, nor we, with all our pains,
Can make clean work; there will be some re-
mains.

While you have still your Oates, and we our
Hains.

EPILOGUE TO THE PILGRIM.*

PERHAPS the parson stretch'd a point too far,
When with our theatres he waged a war.
He tells you, that this very moral age
Receiv'd the first infection from the stage.
But sure, a banish'd court, with lewdness

fraught,

The seeds of open vice, returning, brought.
Thus lodg'd (as vice by great example thrives)
It first debauch'd the daughters and the wives.
London, a fruitful soil, yet never bore
So plentiful a crop of horns before.
The Poets, who must live by courts, or starve,
Were proud so good a government to serve;
And, mixing with buffoons and pimps profane,
Tainted the Stage, for some small snip of gain.

*

Thus did the thriving malady prevail,
The court, its head, the Poets but the tail.
The sin was of our native growth, 't is true;
The scandal of the sin was wholly new.
Misses they were, but modestly conceal'd;
Whitehall the naked Venus first reveal'd.
Who standing as at Cyprus, in her shrine,
The strumpet was ador'd with rites divine.
Ere this, if saints had any secret motion,
'T was chamber practice all, and close devotion.
I pass the peccadillos of their time;
Nothing but open lewdness was a crime.
A monarch's blood was venial to the nation,
Compar'd with one foul act of fornication.
Now, they would silence us, and shut the door,
That let in all the barefac'd vice before.
As for reforming us, which some pretend,
That work in England is without an end :
Well may we change, but we shall never mend.
Yet, if you can but bear the present Stage,
We hope much better of the coming age.

• Dryden in this epilogue labours to throw the fault of the licentiousness of dramatic writers, which had been so severely censured by the Rev. Jeremy Collier,upon the example of a court returned from banishment, accompanied by all the vices and follies of foreign climates; and whom to please was the poet's business, as he wrote to eat. D.

TRANSLATIONS FROM THEOCRITUS, LUCRETIUS, AND HORACE.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND
MISCELLANY.

FOR this last half year I have been troubled with the disease (as I may call it) of translation. The cold prose fits of it, which are always the most tedious with me, were spent in the History of the League; the hot, which succeeded them, in this volume of Verse Miscellanies. The truth is, I fancied to myself, a kind of ease in the change of the paroxysm; never suspecting but the humour would have wasted itself in two or three pastorals of Theocritus, and as many odes of Horace. But finding, or at least thinking I found, something that was more pleasing in them than my ordinary productions, I encouraged myself to renew my old acquaintance with Lucretius and Virgil; and immediately fixed upon some parts of them, which had most affected me in the reading. These were my natural impulses for the undertaking; but there was an accidental motive which was full as forcible, and God forgive him who was the occasion of it. It was my Lord Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse; which made me uneasy till I tried whether or no I was capable of following his rules, and of reducing the speculation into practice. For many a fair precept in Poetry is like a seeming demonstration in the Mathematics, very specious in the diagram, but failing in the mechanic operation. I think I have generally observed his instruc tions; I am sure my reason is sufficiently convinced both of their truth and usefulness; which, in other words, is to confess no less a vanity, than to pretend that I have at least in some places made examples to his rules. Yet, withal

I must acknowledge, that 1 have many times exceeded my commission; for I have both added and omitted, and even sometimes very boldly made such expositions of my authors, as no Dutch commentator will forgive me. Perhaps, in such particular passages, I have thought that I discovered some beauty yet undiscovered by those pedants, which none but a Poet could have found. Where I have taken away some of their expressions, and cut them shorter, it may possibly be on this consideration, that what was beautiful in the Greek or Latin, would not appear so shining in the English; and where I have enlarged them, I desire the false critics would not always think, that those thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the Poet, or may be fairly deduced from him; or at least, if both those considerations should fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an English man, they are such as he would probably have written.

For, after all, a translator is to make his author appear as charming as possibly he can, provided he maintains his character, and makes him not unlike himself. Translation is a kind of drawing after the life, where every one will acknowledge there is a double sort of likeness, a good one and a bad. 'T is one thing to draw the outlines true, the features like, the proportions exact, the colouring itself perhaps tolerable; and another thing to make all these graceful, by the posture, the shadowings, and chiefly by the spirit which animates the whole. I cannot, without some indignation, look on an ill copy of an excellent original. Much less can I behold with patience Virgil, Homer, and some others, whose beauties I have been endeavouring all my life to imitate, so abused, as I may say, to their faces, by a botching interpreter. What English readers, unacquainted with Greek or Latin, will believe me, or any other man, when we commend those authors, and confess we derive all that is pardonable in us from their fountains, if they take those to be the same poets, whom our Ogilbys have translated? But I dare assure them, that a good Poet is no more like himself, in a dull translation, than his carcass would be to his living body. There are many, who understand Greek and Latin, and yet are ignorant of their mother tongue. The proprieties and delicacies of the English are known to few: 't is impossible even for a good wit to understand and practise them, without the help of a liberal education, long reading, and digesting of those few good authors we have amongst us, the knowledge of men and manners, the freedom of habitudes and conversation with the best company of both sexes;

and, in short, without wearing off the rust which he contracted, while he was laying in a stock of learning. Thus difficult it is to understand the purity of English, and critically to discern not only good writers from bad, and a proper style from a corrupt, but also to distinguish that which is pure in a good author, from that which is vicious and corrupt in him. And for want of all these requisites, or the greatest part of them, most of our ingenious young men take up some cried-up English Poet for their model, adore him and imitate him, as they think, without knowing wherein he is defective, where he is boyish and trifling wherein either his thoughts are improper to his subjects, or his expressions unworthy of his thoughts, or the turn of both is unharmonious.

So

Thus it appears necessary, that a man should be a nice critic in his mother-tongue, before he attempts to translate a foreign language. Neither is it sufficient, that he be able to judge of words and style; but he must be a master of them too: he must perfectly understand his author's tongue, and absolutely command his own. that, to be a thorough translator, he must be a thorough poet. Neither is it enough to give his author's sense in good English, in poetical expressions, and in musical numbers; for, though all these are exceeding difficult to perform, there yet remains a harder task; and 't is a secret of which few translators have suffici

ently thought. I have already hinted a word or two concerning it; that is, the maintaining the character of an author, which distinguishes him from all others, and makes him appear that individual poet, whom you would interpret. For example, not only the thoughts, but the style and versification of Virgil and Ovid, are very different: yet I see, even in our best poets, who have translated some parts of them, that they have confounded their several talents; and, by endeavouring only at the sweetness and harmony of numbers, have made them both so much alike, that if I did not know the originals, I should never be able to judge by the copies, which was Virgil, and which was Ovid. It was objected against a late noble painter,* that he drew many graceful pictures, but few of them were like. And this happened to him, because he always studied himself, more than those who sat to him. In such translators I can easily distinguish the hand which performed the work, but I cannot distinguish their poet from another. Suppose two authors are equally sweet, yet there is a great distinction to be made in sweetness, as that in sugar, and that of honey. I can

'Sir P. Lely.