.'[16] I
believe no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer as the
power of rejecting his own thoughts; and it must be this, if any thing,
that can give me a chance to be one. For what I have published I can
only hope to be pardoned; but for what I have burned I deserve to be
praised. On this account the world is under some obligation to me, and
owes me the justice in return to look upon no verses as mine that are
not inserted in this collection.[17] And perhaps nothing could make it
worth my while to own what are really so, but to avoid the imputation of
so many dull and immoral things, as partly by malice, and partly by
ignorance, have been ascribed to me. I must further acquit myself of the
presumption of having lent my name to recommend any Miscellanies,[18]
or works of other men;[19] a thing I never thought becoming a person who
has hardly credit enough to answer for his own.

In this office of collecting my pieces, I am altogether uncertain
whether to look upon myself as a man building a monument,[20] or burying
the dead. If time shall make it the former, may these poems, as long as
they last, remain as a testimony, that their author never made his
talents subservient to the mean and unworthy ends of party or
self-interest; the gratification of public prejudices or private
passions; the flattery of the undeserving, or the insult of the
unfortunate. If I have written well, let it be considered that it is
what no man can do without good sense, a quality that not only renders
one capable of being a good writer, but a good man. And if I have made
any acquisition in the opinion of any one under the notion of the
former, let it be continued to me under no other title than that of the
latter.[21]

But if this publication be only a more solemn funeral of my remains, I
desire it may be known that I die in charity, and in my senses, without
any murmurs against the justice of this age, or any mad appeals to
posterity. I declare I shall think the world in the right, and quietly
submit to every truth which time shall discover to the prejudice of
these writings; not so much as wishing so irrational a thing as that
every body should be deceived merely for my credit. However, I desire it
may then be considered, that there are very few things in this
collection which were not written under the age of five-and-twenty, so
that my youth may be made, as it never fails to be in executions, a case
of compassion; that I wa