generally speaking, he is mistaken in his account, and reckons short
of the expense he first intended. He alters his mind as the work
proceeds, and will have this or that convenience more, of which he had
not thought when he began. So has it happened to me; I have built a
house, where I intended but a lodge; yet with better success than a
certain nobleman,[1] who, beginning with a dog kennel, never liv'd to
finish the palace he had contriv'd.

From translating the first of Homer's _Iliads_ (which I intended as an
essay to the whole work) I proceeded to the translation of the twelfth
book of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, because it contains, among other
things, the causes, the beginning, and ending, of the Trojan war.
Here I ought in reason to have stopp'd; but the speeches of Ajax
and Ulysses lying next in my way, I could not balk 'em. When I had
compass'd them, I was so taken with the former part of the fifteenth
book, (which is the masterpiece of the whole _Metamorphoses_,) that
I enjoin'd myself the pleasing task of rend'ring 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
_Hunting of the Boar, Cinyras and Myrrha_, the good-natur'd 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 may say without vanity, is not the talent
of every poet. He who has arriv'd 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 flourish'd in the
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 poetical son of Spenser, and
Mr. Waller of Fairfax, for we have our lineal descents and clans as
well as other families. Spenser more than once insinuates that the
soul of Chaucer was transfus'd into his body, and that he was begotten
by him two hundred years after his decease. Milton has acknowledg'd to
me that Spenser was his original, and many besides myself have heard
our famous Waller own that he deriv'd the harmony of his numbers
from the _Godfrey of Bulloign_, w