any man by a kinder method, I should never think it proper to scold or laugh at him.

Perhaps there are some morose readers, that stand ready to condemn every line that is written upon the theme of love; but have we not the cares and the felicities of that sort of social life represented to us in the sacred writings? Some expressions are there used with a design to give a mortifying influence to our softest affections; others again brighten the character of that state, and allure virtuous souls to pursue the divine advantage of it, the mutual assistance in the way to salvation.

Are not the cxxviith and the cxxviiith Psalms indited on this very subject? Shall it be lawful for the press and the pulpit to treat of it with a becoming solemnity in prose, and must the mention of the same thing in poesy be pronounced for "ever unlawful? Is it utterly unworthy of a serious character to write on this argument, because it has been unhappily polluted by some scurrilous pens? Why may I not be permitted to obviate a common and a growing mischief, while a thousand vile poems of the amorous kind swarm abroad, and give a vicious taint to the unwary reader? I would tell the world that I have endeavored to recover this argument out of the hands of impure writers, and to make it appear, that virtue and love are not such strangers as they are represented. The blissful intimacy of souls in that

state will afford sufficient furniture for the gravest entertainment in verse; so that it need not be everlastingly dressed-up in ridicule, nor assumed only to furnish out the lewd sonnets of the times. May some happier genius promote the same service that I proposed, and by superior sense, and sweeter sound, render what I have written contemptible and useless!

The imitations of that noblest Latin poet of modern ages, Casimire Sarbiewski, of Poland, would need no excuse, did they but rise to the beauty of the original. I have often taken the freedom to add ten or twenty lines, or to leave out as many, that I might suit my song more to my own design, or because I saw it impossible to present the force, the fineness, and the fire of his expression in our language. There are a few copies wherein I have borrowed some hints from the same author, without the mention of his name in the title. Methinks I can allow so superior a genius now and then to be lavish in his imagination, and to indulge some excursions beyond the limits of sedate judgment: the riches and glories of his verse make atonement in abundance. I wish some English pen would import more of his treasures, and bless our nation.

The inscriptions to particular friends are warranted and defended by the practice of almost all the Lyric writers. They frequently convey the rigid rules of morality to the mind in the softer

method of applause. Sustained by their example, a man will not easily be overwhelmed by the heaviest censures of the unthinking and unknowing; especially when there is a shadow of this practice in the divine Psalmist, while he ascribes to Asaph or Jeduthun his songs that were made for the harp, or (which is all one) his Lyric odes, though they are addressed to God himself.

In the Poems of Heroic Measure,' I have attempted in rhyme the same variety of cadence, comma, and period, which blank verse glories in as its peculiar elegance and ornament. It degrades the excellency of the best versification, when the lines run on by couplets, twenty together, just in the same pace, and with the same pauses. It spoils the noblest pleasure of the sound: the reader is tired with the tedious uniformity, or charmed to sleep with the unmanly softness of the numbers, and the perpetual chime of even cadences.

In the Essays without Rhyme,' I have not set up Milton for a perfect pattern: though he shall be for ever honoured as our deliverer from the bondage. His works contain admirable and unequalled instances of bright and beautiful diction, as well as majesty and serenity 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. sometimes of his

The length of his periods, and parentheses, 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 grandeur of a poem; nor will I ever affect archasms, 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 to the days of Colin the shepherd, and the reign of the Faery Queen. The oddness of an antique sound gives but a 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 lines to the shorter size of the ancients, and avoided to imitate the excessive length to which

the Par

some modern writers have stretched their senIn these the ear is the truest judge; nor was it made to be enslaved to any precise model of elder or later times.

at tences, especially the concluding verse.

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 topics 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 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 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 greatest satisfac