not already acquainted with them. You are so generally
known to be above the meanness of my praises, that you have spared my
evidence, and spoiled my compliment: Should I take for my common
places, your knowledge both of the old and the new philosophy; should
I add to these your skill in mathematics and history; and yet farther,
your being conversant with all the ancient authors of the Greek and
Latin tongues, as well as with the modern--I should tell nothing new
to mankind; for when I have once but named you, the world will
anticipate all my commendations, and go faster before me than I can
follow. Be therefore secure, my lord, that your own fame has freed
itself from the danger of a panegyric; and only give me leave to tell
you, that I value the candour of your nature, and that one character
of friendliness, and, if I may have leave to call it, kindness in you,
before all those other which make you considerable in the nation[4].

Some few of our nobility are learned, and therefore I will not
conclude an absolute contradiction in the terms of nobleman and
scholar; but as the world goes now, 'tis very hard to predicate one
upon the other; and 'tis yet more difficult to prove, that a nobleman
can be a friend to poetry. Were it not for two or three instances in
Whitehall, and in the town, the poets of this age would find so little
encouragement for their labours, and so few understanders, that they
might have leisure to turn pamphleteers, and augment the number of
those abominable scribblers, who, in this time of licence, abuse the
press, almost every day, with nonsense, and railing against the
government.

It remains, my lord, that I should give you some account of this
comedy, which you have never seen; because it was written and acted in
your absence, at your government of Jamaica. It was intended for an
honest satire against our crying sin of _keeping_; how it would have
succeeded, I can but guess, for it was permitted to be acted only
thrice. The crime, for which it suffered, was that which is objected
against the satires of Juvenal, and the epigrams of Catullus, that it
expressed too much of the vice which it decried. Your lordship knows
what answer was returned by the elder of those poets, whom I last
mentioned, to his accusers:

_--castum esse decet pium poetam
Ipsum. Versiculos nihil necesse est:
Qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem
Si sint molliculi et parum pudici._

But I dare not make that a