now render myself grateful, and am
studious to justify the bounty of your act; to which, though your mere
authority were satisfying, yet it being an age wherein poetry and the
professors of it hear so ill on all sides, there will a reason be looked
for in the subject. It is certain, nor can it with any forehead be
opposed, that the too much license of poetasters in this time, hath much
deformed their mistress; that, every day, their manifold and manifest
ignorance doth stick unnatural reproaches upon her: but for their
petulancy, it were an act of the greatest injustice, either to let
the learned suffer, or so divine a skill (which indeed should not be
attempted with unclean hands) to fall under the least contempt. For,
if men will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices
and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the
impossibility of any man's being the good poet, without first being a
good man. He that is said to be able to inform young men to all good
disciplines, inflame grown men to all great virtues, keep old men in
their best and supreme state, or, as they decline to childhood, recover
them to their first strength; that comes forth the interpreter and
arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less than human, a
master in manners; and can alone, or with a few, effect the business
of mankind: this, I take him, is no subject for pride and ignorance
to exercise their railing rhetoric upon. But it will here be hastily
answered, that the writers of these days are other things; that not only
their manners, but their natures, are inverted, and nothing remaining
with them of the dignity of poet, but the abused name, which every
scribe usurps; that now, especially in dramatic, or, as they term it,
stage-poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation, blasphemy, all license
of offence to God and man is practised. I dare not deny a great part of
this, and am sorry I dare not, because in some men's abortive features
(and would they had never boasted the light) it is over-true; but that
all are embarked in this bold adventure for hell, is a most uncharitable
thought, and, uttered, a more malicious slander. For my particular, I
can, and from a most clear conscience, affirm, that I have ever trembled
to think toward the least profaneness; have loathed the use of such
foul and unwashed bawdry, as is now made the food of the scene: and,
howsoever I cannot escape from some, the imputation of sharp