derived it from Ennius, to your lordship; that is, from its first rudiments of barbarity, to its last Rolishing and perfection: which is, with Virgil, in his address to Augustus,

nomen famâ tot ferre per annos, Tithoni primâ quot abest ab origine Cæsar. I said only from Ennius; but I may safely carry it higher, as far as Livius Andronicus; who, as I have said formerly, taught the first play at Rome, in the year ab urbe conditâ cccccxiv. I have since desired my learned friend, Mr. Maidwell, to compute the difference of times, betwixt Aristophanes and Livius Andronicus; and he assures me from the best chronologers, that Plutus, the last of Aristophanes's plays, was represented at Athens, in the year of the 97th olympiad; which agrees with the year urbis condite cCCI XIV. So that the difference of years betwixt Aristophanes and Andronicus is 150; from whence I have probably deduced, that Livius Andronicus, who was a Grecian, had read the plays of the old comedy, which were satirical, and also of the new; for Menander was fifty years before him, which must needs be a great light to him, in his own plays, that were of the satirical nature. That the Romans had farces before this, it is true; but then they had no communication with Greece: so that Andronicus was

but for the most part figuratively, and occultly; consisting in a low familiar way, chiefly in a sharp and pungent manner of speech; but partly, also, in a facetious and civil way of jesting; by which either hatred, or laughter, or indignation is moved."-Where I cannot but observe, that this obscure and perplexed definition, or rather description of satire, is wholly accommodated to the and Persius, as foreign from that kind of poem: Horatian way; and, excluding the works of Juvenal the clause in the beginning of it ("without a from stage-plays, which are all of one action, and series of action") distinguishes satire properly one continued series of action. The end or scop of satire is to purge the passions; so far it is com mon to the satires of Juvenal and Persius: the rest which follows, is also generally belonging to all three; till he comes upon us, with the excluding clause" consisting in a low familiar way of speech," which is the proper character of Horace; and from which, the other two, for their honour be it spoken, are far distant: but how come losness of style, and the familiarity of words, to be so much the propriety of satire, that without them, a poet can be no more a satirist, than without risibility he can be a man? Is the fault of Horace to be made the virtue and standing rule of this the first who wrote after the manner of the old sublimity of Juvenal to be circumscribed, with the poem? Is the grande sophos of Persius, and the comedy, in his plays; he was imitated by Ennius, about thirty years afterwards. Though the formeanness of words, and vulgarity of expression? mer writ fables; the latter, speaking properly, loftiness of figures, are they bound to follow so ill If Horace refused the pains of numbers, and the began the Roman satire. According to that description, which Juvenal gives of it in his first; quic-in his hand, for his own pleasure; but let not a precedent? Let him walk a-foot with his pad quid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli. This is that in which I have made bold to differ from Casaubon, Rigaltius, Dacier, and indeed from all the modern critics, that not Ennius, but Andronicus was the first, who by the Archæa Comadia of the Greeks, added many beauties to the first rude and barbarous Roman satire: which sort of poem, though we had not derived from Rome, yet nature teaches it mankind, in all ages, and in every country.

It is but necessary, that, after so much has been said of satire, some definition of it should be given. Heinsius, in his dissertations on Horace, makes it for me, in these words; "Satire is a kind of poetry, without a series of action, invented for the purging of our minds; in which human vices, ignorance, and errors, and all things besides, which are produced from them, in every man, are severely reprehended; partly dramatically, partly simply, and sometimes in both kinds of speaking;

them be accounted no poets, who chuse to mount and show the horsemanship. Holiday is not afraid to say, that there never was such a fall, as from his odes to his satires, and that he, injuriously to himself, untuned his harp. The majestic way of Persius and Juvenal was new when they began with time, received an alteration in their fashion? it, but it is old to us; and what poems have not, Which alteration, says Holiday, is to after-times, as good a warrant as the first. Has not Virgil changed the manners of Homer's heroes in his Eneid? Certainly he has, and for the better. For Virgil's age was more civilized, and better bred: and he writ according to the politeness of Rome, under the reign of Augustus Cæsar; not to the rudeness of Agamemnon's age, or the times of Homer. Why should we offer to confine free spirits to one form, when we cannot so much as confine our bodies to one fashion of apparel? Would not Donne's satires, which abound with so much

wit, appear more charming, if he had taken care of his words, and of his numbers? But he followed Horace so very close, that of necessity he must fall with him and I may safely say it of this present age, that if we are not so great wits as Donne, yet certainly, we are better poets.

But I have said enough, and it may be too much, on this subject. Will your lordship be pleased to prolong my audience, only so far, till I tell your my own trivial thoughts how a modern satire should be made. I will not deviate in the least from the precepts and examples of the ancients, who were always our best masters. I will only illustrate them, and discover some of the hidden beauties in their designs, that we thereby may form our own in imitation of them. Will you please but to observe, that Persius, the least in dignity of all the three, has notwithstanding been the first, who has discovered to us this important secret, in the designing of a perfect satire, that it ought only to treat of one subject; to be confined to one particular theme; or, at least, to one principally. If other vices occur in the management of the chief, they should only be transiently Jashed, and not be insisted on, so as to make the design double. As in a play of the English fashion, which we call a tragi-comedy, there is to be but one main design: and though there be an underplot, or second walk of comical characters and adventures, yet they are subservient to the chief fable, carried along under it, and helping to it; so that the drama may not seem a monster with two heads. Thus the Copernican system of the planets makes the Moon to be moved by the motion of the Earth, and carried about her orb, as a dependent of hers. Mascardi, in his discourse of the Doppia favola, or double tale in plays, gives an instance of it, in the famous pastoral of Guarini, called Il Pastor Fido; where Corisca and the Satyr are the under-parts: yet we may observe, that Corisca is brought into the body of the plot, and made subservient to it. It is certain that the divine wit of Horace was not ignorant of this rule, that a play, though it consists of many parts, must yet be one in the action, and must drive on the accomplishment of one design; for he gives this very precept, Sit quodvis simplex duntaxat & unum; yet he seems not much to mind it in his satires, many of them consisting of more arguments than one; and the second without dependance on the first. Casaubon has observed this before me, in his preference of Persius to Horace and will have his own beloved author to be the first, who found out, and introduced this method of confining himself to one

subject. I know it may be urged in defence of Horace, that this uaity is not necessary; because the very word satura signifies a dish plentifully stored with all variety of fruit and grains. Yet Juvenal, who calls his poems a farrago, which is a word of the same signification with satura, has chosen to follow the same method of Persius, and not of Horace. And Boileau, whose example alone is a sufficient authority, has wholly confined himself, in all his satires, to this unity of design. That variety which is not to be found in any one satire, is at least, in many, written on several occasions. And if variety be of absolute necessity in every one of them, according to the etymology of the word; yet it may arise naturally from one subject, as it is diversly treated in the several subordinate branches of it; all relating to the chief. It may be illustrated accordingly with variety of examples in the subdivisions of it; and with as many precepts as there are members of it; which altogether may complete that olla, or hotch-potch, which is properly a satire.

Under this unity of theme, or subject, is comprehended another rule for perfecting the design of true satire. The poet is bound, and that er officio, to give his reader some one precept of moral virtue; and to caution him against some one particular vice or folly. Other virtues, subordinate to the first, may be recommended, under that chief head; and other vices or follies may be scourged, besides that which he principally intends. But he is chiefly to inculcate one virtue, and insist on that. Thus Juvenal, in every satire, excepting the first, ties himself to one principal instructive point, or to the shunning of moral evil. Even in the sixth, which seems only an arraignment of the whole sex of womankind, there is a latent admonition to avoid ill women, by showing how very few, who are virtuous and good, are to be found amongst them. But this, though the wittiest of all his satires, has yet the least of truth or instruction in it. He has run himself into his old declamatory way, and almost forgotten that he was now setting up for a moral poet.

Persius is never wanting to us in some profitable doctrine, and in exposing the opposite vices to it. His kind of philosophy is one, which is the stoic; and every satire is a comment on one particular dogma of that sect; unless we will except the first, which is against bad writers; and yet even there he forgets not the precepts of the porch. In general, all virtues are every where to be praised and recommended to practice; and all vices to be reprehended, and made either odious or ridiculous:

or else there is a fundamental errour in the whole hand, that I would prefer the verse of ten sylla design. bles, which we call the English heroic, to that of I have already declared who are the only per-eight. This is truly my opinion: for this sort of sons that are the adequate object of private satire, number is more roomy: the thought can turn and who they are that may properly be exposed itself with greater ease in a larger compass. When by name for public examples of vices and follies: the rhyme comes too thick upon us, it straitens and therefore I will trouble your lordship no far- the expression; we are thinking of the close, ther with them. Of the best and finest manner of when we should be employed in adorning the satire, I have said enough in the comparison betwixt thought. It makes a poet giddy with turning in Juvenal and Horace: it is that sharp, well-man- a space too narrow for his imagination; he loses nered way of laughing a folly out of countenance, many beauties, without gaining one advantage. of which your lordship is the best master in this For a burlesque rhyme, I have already concluded age. I will proceed to the versification, which is to be none; or if it were, it is more easily pur most proper for it, and add somewhat to what chased in ten syllables than in eight: in both ocI have said already on that subject. The sort of casions it is as in a tennis-court, when the strokes verse which is called burlesque, consisting of eight of greater force are given, when we strike out syllables, or four feet, is that which our excel- and play at length. Tasso and Boileau have lent Hudibrass has chosen. I ought to have men- left us the best examples of this way, in the Sectioned him before, when I spake of Donne; but chia Rapita, and the Lutrin. And next them by a slip of an old man's memory, he was for- Merlin Coccajus in his Baldus. I will speak only gotten. The worth of his poem is too well known of the two former, because the latter is written in to need any commendation, and he is above my Latin verse. The Secchia Rapita is an Italian censure: his satire is of the Varronian kind, poem, a satire of the Varronian kind. It is though unmixed with prose. The choice of his written in the stanza of eight, which is their numbers is suitable enough to his design, as he measure for heroic verse. The words are stately, has managed it: but in any other hand, the short- the numbers smooth, the turn both of thoughts ness of his verse, and the quick returns of rhyme, and words 'is happy. The first six lines of the had debased the dignity of style. And besides, stanza seem majestical and severe, but the two the double rhyme (a necessary companion of bur- last turn them all into a pleasant ridicule. Boilesque writing) is not so proper for manly satire, leau, if I am not much deceived, has modelled for it turns earnest too much to jest, and gives from hence his famous Lutrin. He had read the us a boyish kind of pleasure. It tickles aukwardly burlesque poetry of Scarron, with some kind of with a kind of pain, to the best sort of readers; indignation, as witty as it was, and found nothing we are pleased ungratefully, and, if I may say so, in France that was worthy of his imitation. But against our liking. We thank him not for giving he copied the Italian so well, that his own may us that unseasonable delight, when we know he pass for an original. He writes it in the French could have given us a better, and more solid. He heroic verse, and calls it an heroic poem: his might have left that task to others, who, not subject is trivial, but his verse is noble. I doubt being able to put in thought, can only make us not but he had Virgil in his eye, for we find grin with the excrescence of a word of two or many admirable imitations of him, and some three syllables in the close. It is, indeed, below parodies; as particularly this passage in the fourth so great a master to make use of such a little of the Eneids: instrument. But his good sense is perpetually shining through all he writes; it affords us not the time of finding faults. We pass through the levity of his rhyme, and are immediately carried into some admirable useful thought. After all, he has chosen this kind of verse; and has written the best in it: and had he taken another, he would always have excelled. As we say of a court favourite, that whatsoever his office be, he still makes it uppermost, and most beneficial to himself.

The quickness of your imagination, my lord, has already prevented me; and you know before.

Nec tibi Diva parens; generis nec Dardanus auctor,
Perfide; sed duris genuit te cautibus horrens
Caucasus; Hyrcanæque admôrunt ubera tigres.
but altering the sense:
Which he thus translates, keeping to the words,

Non, ton Pere a Paris, ne fut point Boulanger:
Et tu n'es point du sang de Gervais Horologer:
Ta Mere ne fut point la Maitresse d'un Coche;
Caucase dans ses flancs, te forma d'une Roche:
Une Tigresse affreuse, en quelque Antre écarté,
Te fit, avec son laict, succer sa Cruauté.
And, as Virgil in his fourth Georgic of the Bees

the loftiness of his words; and ennobles it by comparisons drawn from empires, and from monarchs.

Admiranda tibi levium spectacula rerum,

Magnanimosque Duces, totiusque ordine gentis
Mores & studia, & populos, & prælia dicam.
And again:

Sic Genuus immortale manent; multosque
per annos

perpetually raises the lowness of his subject, by | Homer, whose age had not arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true sublimity, lofty thoughts, which were clothed with admirable Grecisms, and ancient words, which he had been digging from the mines of Chaucer and Spenser, and which, with all their rusticity, had somewhat of venerable in them. But I found not there neither that for which I looked. At last I had recourse to his master, Spenser, the author of that immortal poem called The Fairy Queen; and there I met with that which I had been looking for so long in vain. Spenser had studied Virgil to as much advantage as Milton had done Homer; and among the rest of his excellencies had copied that. Looking farther into the Italian, I found Tasso had done the same; nay more, that all the sonnets in that language are on the turn of the first thought; which Mr. Walsh, in his late ingenious preface to his poems, has observed. In short, Virgil and Ovid are the two principal fountains of them in Latin poem. And the French at this day are so fond of them, that they judge them to be the first beauties. Delicate & bien tourné, are the highest commendations which they bestow on somewhat which they think a master-piece.

Stat fortuna domus, & avi numerantur avorum. We see Boileau pursuing him in the same flights; and scarcely yielding to his master. This, I think, my lord, to be the most beautiful, and most noble kind of satire. Here is the majesty of the heroic, finely mixed with the venom of the other; and raising the delight, which otherwise would be flat and vulgar, by the sublimity of the expression. I could say somewhat more of the delicacy of this and some other of his satires; but it might turn to his prejudice, if it were carried back to France.

in a

An example on the turn of words, amongst a thousand others, is that in the last book of Ovid's Metamorphoses:

Heu quantum scelus est, in viscera, viscera

condi!

I have given your lordship but this bare hint, in what manner this sort of satire may best be managed. Had I time, I could enlarge on the beautiful turns of words and thoughts; which are as requisite in this, as in heroic poetry itself; of which the satire is undoubtedly a species. With these beautiful turns I confess myself to have been unacquainted, till about twenty years ago, conversation which I had with that noble wit of Scotland, sir George Mackenzie: he asked me why I did not imitate in my verses the turns of An example on the turn both of thoughts and Mr. Waller and sir John Denham; of which he words is to be found in Catullus; in the complaint repeated many to me. I had often read with of Ariadne, when she was left by Theseus: pleasure, and with some profit, those two fathers Tum jam nulla viro juranti fœmina credat ; of our English poetry; but had not seriously Nulla viri speret sermones esse fideles:

Enough considered those beauties which give the ast perfection to their works. Some sprinklings of this kind I had also formerly in my plays; but They were casual, and not designed. But this int, thus seasonably given me, first made me ensible of my own wants, and brought me afterwards to seek for the supply of them in other English authors. I looked over the darling of my youth, the famous Cowley; there I found, instead of them, the points of wit, and quirks of epigram, Even in the Davideis, an heroic poem, which is of opposite nature to those puerilities; but no elegant turns either on the word or on the thought. Then I consulted a greater genius (without offence o the manes of that noble author) I mean Milton; at as he endeavours every where to express

Congestoque avidum pinguescere corpore corpus;
Alteriusque, animantem animantis vivere leto!

Qui dum aliquid cupiens animus prægestit
apisci,

Nil metuunt jurare; nibil promittere parcunt.
Sed simul ac cupidæ mentis satiata libido est,
Dicta nihil metucre; nihil perjuria curant.

An extraordinary turn upon the words, is that
in Ovid's Epistolæ Heroidum of Sappho to Phaon :
Si nisi quæ formâ poterit te digna videri,
Nulla futura tua est; nulla futura tua est.

Lastly, a turn which I cannot say is absolutely on words, for the thought turns with them, is in the fourth Georgic of Virgil; where Orpheus is to receive his wife from Hell, on express condition not to look on her till she was come on Earth:

Cùm subita incautum dementia cepit Amantem;
Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere manes.

I will not burden your Lordship with more of them; for I write to a master, who understands them better than myself. But I may safely conclude them to be great beauties: I might descend also to the mechanic beauties of heroic verse; but we have yet no English prosodia, not so much as a tolerable dictionary, or a grammar; so that our

language is in a manner barbarous; and what government will encourage any one, or more, who are capable of refining it, I know not: but nothing under a public expense can go through with it. And I rather fear a declination of the language, than hope an advancement of it in the present

age.

I am still speaking to you, my lord: though, in all probability, you are already out of hearing. Nothing, which my meanness can produce, is worthy of this long attention. But I am come to the last petition of Abraham: if there be ten righteous lines, in this vast preface, spare it for their sake; and also spare the next city, because it is but a little one.

our two great authors be answerable to their fame and reputation in the world. We have therefore endeavoured to give the public all the satisfaction we are able in this kind.

And if we are not altogether so faithful to our author, as our predecessors, Holiday and Stapylthat we shall be far more pleasing to our readers. ton; yet we may challenge to ourselves this praise, We have followed our authors at greater distance, though not step by step, as they have done. For

oftentimes they have gone so close, that they have trod on the heels of Juvenal and Persius, and burt them by their too near approach. A noble anthor would not be pursued too close by a translator. We lose his spirit, when we think to take his body. The grosser part remains with us, but the soul is flown away, in some noble expression, or some delicate turn of words, or thought. Holiday, who made this way his choice, scized the meaning of Juvenal; but the poetry has always scaped him.'

Thes

They who will not grant me, that pleasure is one of the ends of poetry, but that it is only a means of compassing the only end, which is instruction; must yet allow, that without the mcaus of pleasure, the instruction is but a bare and dry philosophy; a crude preparation of morals, which we may have from Aristotle and Epictetus, with more profit than from any poet: neither Holiday nor Stapylton have imitated Juvenal, in the

cution. Nor had they been poets, as neither of them were; yet in the way they took, it was impossible for them to have succeeded in the

poetic part.

I would excuse the performance of this translation, if it were all my own; but the better, though not the greater part, being the work of some gentlemen, who have succeeded very happily in their undertaking; let their excellencies atone for my imperfections, and those of my sons. I have peru-poetical part of him, his diction and his eləsed some of the satires, which are done by other hands; and they seem to me as perfect in their kind, as any thing I have seen in English verse. The common way which we have taken, is not a literal translation, but a kind of paraphrase; or somewhat which is yet more loose, betwixt a paraphrase and imitation. It was not possible for us, or any men, to have made it pleasant any other way. If rendering the exact sense of those authors, almost line for line, had been our business, Barten Holiday had done it already to our hands: and, by the help of his learned notes and illustrations, not only Juvenal and Persius, but what is yet more obscure, his own verses, might be understood.

But he wrote for fame, and wrote to scholars : we write only for the pleasure and entertainment of those gentlemen and ladies, who, though they are not scholars, are not ignorant: persons of understanding and good sense; who, not having been conversant in the original, or at least not having made Latin verse so much their business as to be eritics in it, would be glad to find, if the wit of

The English verse, which we call heroic, consists of more than ten syllables; the Latin hexameter sometimes rises to seventeen; as for example, this verse in Virgil:

Pulverulenta putrem sonitu quatit ungula

campum.

Here is the difference of no less than seven syllables in a line betwixt the English and the Latin.

Now

the medium of these, is about fourteen syllables; because the dactyle is a more frequent foot in hexameters than the spondee.

But Holiday, without considering that he writ verse, endeavours to make one of his lines to comwith the disadvantage of four syllables less in every prehend the sense of one of Juvenal's. According He was forced to crowd his verse with ill-sounding to the falsity of the proposition was the success. monosyllables, of which our barbarous language affords him a wild plenty; and by that means be.