own sufferings.
Other men endure their diseases, your Lordship only can enjoy them!

Plotting and Writing in this kind, are, certainly, more troublesome
employments than many which signify more, and are of greater moment in
the world. The Fancy, Memory, and Judgement are then extended, like so
many limbs, upon the rack; all of them reaching, with their utmost
stress, at Nature: a thing so almost infinite and boundless, as can never
fully be comprehended but where the Images of all things are always
present.

Yet I wonder not your Lordship succeeds so well in this attempt. The
knowledge of men is your daily practice in the world. To work and bend
their stubborn minds; which go not all after the same grain, but, each of
them so particular a way, that the same common humours, in several
persons, must be wrought upon by several means.

Thus, my Lord! your sickness is but the imitation of your health; the
Poet but subordinate to the Statesman in you. You still govern men with
the same address, and manage business with the same prudence: allowing it
here, as in the world, the due increase and growth till it comes to the
just height; and then turning it, when it is fully ripe, and Nature calls
out (as it were) to be delivered. With this only advantage of ease to you,
in your Poetry: that you have Fortune, here, at your command: with which,
Wisdom does often unsuccessfully struggle in the world. Here is no
Chance, which you have not foreseen. All your heroes are more than your
subjects, they are your creatures: and, though they seem to move freely,
in all the sallies of their passions; yet, you make destinies for them,
which they cannot shun. They are moved, if I may dare to say so, like the
rational creatures of the Almighty Poet; who walk at liberty, in their own
opinion, because their fetters are invincible: when, indeed, the Prison of
their Will is the more sure, for being large; and instead of an Absolute
Power over their actions, they have only a Wretched Desire of doing that,
which they cannot choose but do.

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 stayed long in my own depth; and though I am eager of
performing more, yet I am loath to venture out beyond my knowledge. For
beyond your Poetry, my Lord! all is Ocean to me.

To speak of