ot willingly let
it die.

These thoughts at once possest me, and these other, that if I were
certain to write as men buy leases, for three lives and downward,
there ought no regard be sooner had than to God's glory, by the honor
and instruction of my country. For which cause, and not only for that
I knew it would be hard to arrive at the second rank among the Latins,
I applied myself to that resolution which Ariosto followed against the
persuasions of Bembo,[76] to fix all the industry and art I could
unite to the adorning of my native tongue; not to make verbal
curiosities the end--that were a toilsome vanity; but to be an
interpreter, and relater of the best and sagest things among mine own
citizens throughout this island, in the mother dialect. That what the
greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy, and those
Hebrews of old did for their country, I, in my proportion, with this
over and above, of being a Christian, might do for mine; not caring
to be once named abroad, tho perhaps I could attain to that, but
content with these British islands as my world; whose fortune hath
hitherto been, that if the Athenians, as some say, made their small
deeds great and renowned by their eloquent writers, England hath had
her noble achievements made small by the unskilful handling of monks
and mechanics.

Time serves not now, and perhaps I might seem too profuse, to give any
certain account of what the mind at home, in the spacious circuits of
her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, tho of highest hope
and hardest attempting. Whether that epic form, whereof the two poems
of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso are a diffuse, and
the book of Job a brief, model; or whether the rules of Aristotle
herein are strictly to be kept, or nature to be followed, which in
them that know art, and use judgment, is no transgression, but an
enriching of art. And, lastly, what king or knight before the Conquest
might be chosen, in whom to lay the pattern of a Christian hero. And
as Tasso gave to a prince of Italy his choice, whether he would
command him to write of Godfrey's[77] expedition against the infidels,
or Belisarius against the Goths, or Charlemagne against the Lombards;
if to the instinct of nature and the emboldening of art aught may be
trusted, and that there be nothing adverse in our climate, or the fate
of this age, it haply would be no rashness, from an equal diligence
and inclination, to presen