them,
when tormented by the gout, enhanced their value, it may be allowed to
apologise for their faults.]

I have dwelt, my lord, thus long upon your writing, not because you
deserve not greater and more noble commendations, but because I am not
equally able to express them in other subjects. Like an ill swimmer,
I have willingly staid long in my own depth; and though I am eager of
performing more, yet am loth to venture out beyond my knowledge: for
beyond your poetry, my lord, all is ocean to me. To speak of you as a
soldier, or a statesman, were only to betray my own ignorance; and I
could hope no better success from it, than that miserable rhetorician
had, who solemnly declaimed before Hannibal, of the conduct of armies,
and the art of war. I can only say, in general, that the souls of
other men shine out at little crannies; they understand some one
thing, perhaps, to admiration, while they are darkened on all the
other parts; but your lordship's soul is an entire globe of light,
breaking out on every side; and, if I have only discovered one beam
of it, it is not that the light falls unequally, but because the body,
which receives it, is of unequal parts.

The acknowledgment of which is a fair occasion offered me, to retire
from the consideration of your lordship to that of myself. I here
present you, my lord, with that in print, which you had the goodness
not to dislike upon the stage; and account it happy to have met you
here in England; it being, at best, like small wines, to be drunk out
upon the place, and has not body enough to endure the sea.

I know not whether I have been so careful of the plot and language as
I ought; but, for the latter, I have endeavoured to write English, as
near as I could distinguish it from the tongue of pedants, and that
of affected travellers. Only I am sorry, that (speaking so noble a
language as we do) we have not a more certain measure of it, as they
have in France, where they have an academy erected for that purpose,
and endowed with large privileges by the present king. I wish we might
at length leave to borrow words from other nations, which is now a
wantonness in us, not a necessity; but so long as some affect to speak
them, there will not want others, who will have the boldness to write
them.

But I fear, lest, defending the received words, I shall be accused for
following the new way, I mean, of writing scenes in verse. Though, to
speak properly, it is not so much a n