instances of bright and beautiful diction, as well as majesty and sereneness of thought. There are several episodes in his longer works, that stand in supreme dignity without a rival; yet all that vast reverence with which I read his Paradise Lost, cannot persuade me to be charmed with every page of it. The length of his periods, and sometimes of his parenthesis, runs me out of breath: some of his numbers seem too harsh and uneasy. I could never believe that roughness and obscurity added any thing to the true grandeur of a poem : nor will I ever affect archaisms, exoticisms, and a quaint uncouthness of speech, in order to become perfectly Miltonian. It is my opinion that blank verse may be written with all due elevation of thought in a modern style, without borrowing any thing from Chaucer's Tales, or running back so far as the days of Colin the Shepherd, and the reign of the Fairy Queen. The oddness of an antique sound gives but false pleasure to the ear, and abuses the true relish, even when it works delight. There were some such judges of poesy among the, old Romans, and Martial ingeniously laughs at one of them that was pleased even to astonishment with obsolete words and figures.

Attonitusque legis terrai frugiferai.

So the ill-drawn postures and distortions of shape, that we meet with in chinese pictures, charm a sickly fancy by their very awkwardness; so a distempered appetite will chew coals and sand, and pronounce it gustful.

In the Pindarics I have generally conformed my

unes to the shorter size of the ancient, and avoided to imitate the excessive lengths to which some modern writers have stretched their sentences, and especially the concluding verse. In these the ear is the truest judge; nor was it made to be enslaved by any precise model of elder or later times.

After all, I must petition my reader to lay aside the sour and sullen air of criticism, and to assume the friend. Let him choose such copies to read at particular hours, when the temper of his mind is suited to the song. Let him come with a desire to be entertained and pleased, rather than to seek his own disgust and aversion, which will not be hard to find. I am not so vain as to think there are no faults, nor so blind as to espy none: though I hope the multitude of alterations in this second edition are not without amendment. There is so large a difference between this and the former, in the change of titles, lines, and whole poems, as well as in the various transpositions, that it would be useless and endless, and all confusion, for any reader to compare them throughout. The additions also make up almost half the book, and some of these have need of as many alterations as the former. Many a line needs the file to polish the roughness of it, and many a thought wants richer language to adorn and make it shine. Wide defects and equal superfluities may be found, especially in the larger pieces; but I have at present neither inclination nor leisure to correct, and I hope I never shall. It is one of the biggest satisfactions I take, in giving this volume to the world, that I expect to be for ever free from the temptation of making or mendVOL. XXIII.

D

ing poems again.* So that my friends may be perfectly secure against this impression's growing waste upon their hands, and useless, as the former has done. Let minds that are better furnished for such performances pursue these studies, if they are convinced that poësy can be made serviceable to religion and virtue. As for myself, I almost blush to think that I have read so little, and written so much. The following years of my life shall be more entirely devoted to the immediate and direct labours of my station, excepting those hours that may be employed in finishing my imitation of the psalms of David, in Christian language, which I have now promised the world.†

I cannot court the world to purchase, this book for their pleasure or entertainment, by telling them that any one copy entirely pleases me. The best of them sinks below the idea which I form of a divine or moral ode. He that deals in the mysteries of Heaven, or of the Muses, should be a genius of no vulgar mould: and, as the name of vates belongs to both; so the furniture of both is comprised in that line of Horace,

--Cui mens divinior, atque os

Magna sonaturum――

But what Juvenal spake in his age, abides true in ours: a complete poet or a prophet is such a

one:

-Qualem nequeo monstrare, et sentio tantum.

* Naturam expellas furca licet, usque recurret.-Hor. Will this short note of Horace excuse a man who has resisted nature many years, but has been sometimes overcome? 1736. Edition the 7th. In the year 1719 these were finished and printed.

Perhaps neither of these characters in perfection shall ever be seen on earth, till the seventh angel has sounded his awful trumpet; till the victory be complete over the beast, and his image, when the natives of Heaven shall join in consort with prophets and saints, and sing to their golden harps, salvation, honour, and glory to him that sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb for ever.'

MAY 14, 1709.