280

let me well consider I give my person Faith, e'en to him that is the fairest bidder; To some rich hunks, if any be so bold To say those dreadful words, To have and hold.

30

But stay to give, and be bequeathing still, When I'm so poor, is just like Wickham's

will:

Like that notorious cheat, vast sums

give,

I

Only that you may keep me while I live. Buy a good bargain, gallants, while you may; I'll cost you but your half a crown a day.

dedicatory signed Will. Mountfort. Mountfort, who was a noted actor and a minor dramatist, does not, however, claim the play as his own. Gildon, in his continuation of Langbaine's English Dramatic Poets, 1699, assigns the play to John Bancroft, a surgeon, who may have presented his work to Mountfort for revision. In Six Plays written by Mr. Mountfort: Printed for J. Tonson, G. Strahan, und W. Mears, 1740, there occurs a preface, The Booksellers to the Reader, which concludes as follows:

"To the four pieces under his name... we have annexed King Edward the Third, and Henry the Second, which though not wholly composed by him, it is presumed he had, at least, a share in fitting them for the stage, otherwise it cannot be supposed he would have taken the liberty of writing dedications to them, which we hope is sufficient authority for this freedom, notwithstanding one of them was afterwards owned by another author.

Henry the Second, by Mr. Bancroft." The play was probably acted in 1692; of that Mountfort was killed on December year.]

THUS you the sad catastrophe have seen, Occasion'd by a mistress and a queen. Queen Eleanor the proud was French, they

say;

But English manufacture got the day.
Jane Clifford was her name, as books aver;
Fair Rosamond was but her nom de guerre.
lead your
Now tell me, gallants, would

you

life With such a mistress, or with such a wife? If one must be your choice, which d'ye

TO THE

RIGHT HONORABLE

CHARLES

EARL OF DORSET AND MIDDLESEX

LORD CHAMBERLAIN OF THEIR MAJES

TIES' HOUSEHOLD, KNIGHT OF THE MOST NOBLE ORDER OF THE GAR

TER, &C.

MY LORD,

THE wishes and desires of all good men, which have attended your Lordship from your first appearance in the world, are at length accomplish'd, in your obtaining those honors and dignities which you have so long deserv'd. There are no factions, tho' irreconcilable to one another, that are not united in their affection to you, and the respect they pay you. They are equally pleas'd in your prosperity, and would be equally concern'd in your afflictions. Titus Vespasian was not more the delight of humankind. The universal empire made him only more known, and more powerful, but could not make him more belov'd. He had greater ability of doing good, but your inclination to it is not less; and tho' you could not extend your beneficence to so many persons, yet you have lost as few days as that excellent emperor; and never had his complaint to make when you went to bed, that the sun had shone upon you in vain, when you had the opportunity of relieving some unhappy man. This, my Lord, has justly acquir'd you as many friends as there are persons who have the honor to be known to you. Mere acquaintance you have none; have drawn them all into a nearer line; and they who have convers'd with you are for ever after inviolably yours. This is a truth so generally acknowledg'd, that it needs no proof: 't is of the nature of a first principle, which is receiv'd as soon as it is propos'd; and needs not the reformation which Descartes us'd to his; for we doubt not, neither can we properly say we think we admire and love you above all other men; there is a certainty in the proposition, and we know it. With the

you

same assurance I can say, you neither have enemies, nor can scarce have any; for they who have never heard of you, can neither love or hate you; and they who have, can have no other notion of you, than that which they receive from the public, that you are the best of men. After this, my testimony can be of no farther use, than to declare it to be daylight at high noon; and all who have the benefit of sight, can look up as well, and see the sun.

"T is true, I have one privilege which is almost particular to myself, that I saw you in the east at your first arising above the hemisphere: I was as soon sensible as any man of that light, when it was but just shooting out, and beginning to travel upwards to the meridian. I made my early addresses to your Lordship, in my Essay of Dramatic Poetry; and therein bespoke you to the world, wherein I have the right of a first discoverer. When I was myself in the rudiments of my poetry, without name or reputation in the world, having rather the ambition of a writer, than the skill; when I was drawing the outlines of an art, without any living master to instruct me in it; an art which had been better prais'd. than studied here in England, wherein Shakespeare, who created the stage among us, had rather written happily, than knowingly and justly, and Jonson, who, by studying Horace, had been acquainted with the rules, yet seem'd to envy to posterity that knowledge, and, like an inventor of some useful art, to make a monopoly of his learning; when thus, as I may say, before the use of the loadstone, or knowledge of the compass, I was sailing in a vast ocean, without other help than the polestar of the ancients, and the rules of the French stage amongst the moderns, which are extremely different from ours, by reason of their opposite taste; yet even then, I had the presumption to dedicate to your Lordship- -a very unfinish'd piece, I must confess, and which only can be excus'd by the little experience of the author, and the modesty of the title, An Essay. Yet I was stronger in prophecy than I was in criticism; I was inspir'd to foretell you to mankind, as the restorer

of poetry, the greatest genius, the truest judge, and the best patron.

Good sense and good nature are never separated, tho' the ignorant world has thought otherwise. Good nature, by which I mean beneficence and candor, is the product of right reason; which of necessity will give allowance to the failings of others, by considering that there is nothing perfect in mankind; and by distinguishing that which comes nearest to excellency, tho' not absolutely free from faults, will certainly produce a candor in the judge. 'Tis incident to an elevated understanding, like your Lordship's, to find out the errors of other men; but 't is your prerogative to pardon them; to look with pleasure on those things, which are somewhat congenial, and of a remote kindred to your own conceptions; and to forgive the many failings of those, who, with their wretched art, cannot arrive to those heights that you possess, from a happy, abundant, and native genius: which are as inborn to you, as they were to Shakespeare; and, for aught I know, to Homer; in either of whom we find all arts and sciences, all moral and natural philosophy, without knowing that they ever studied

them.

There is not an English writer this day living, who is not perfectly convinc'd that your Lordship excels all others in all the several parts of poetry which you have undertaken to adorn. The most vain, and the most ambitious of our age, have not dar'd to assume so much as the competitors of Themistocles: they have yielded the first place without dispute; and have been arrogantly content to be esteem'd as second to your Lordship; and even that also, with a longo, sed proximi intervallo. If there have been, or are any, who go farther in their self-conceit, they must be very singular in their opinion; they must be like the officer in a play, who was call'd Captain, Lieutenant, and Company. The world will easily conclude whether such unattended generals can ever be capable of making a revolution in Parnassus.

I will not attempt, in this place, to say anything particular of your lyric poems, tho' they are the delight and wonder of this age, and will be the envy of the next. The subject of this book confines me to satire; and in that, an author of your own

quality (whose ashes I will not disturb) has given you all the commendation which his self-sufficiency could afford to any man: The best good man, with the worst-natur'd Muse.

In that character, methinks, I am reading Jonson's verses to the memory of Shakespeare; an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric: where good nature, the most godlike commendation of a man, is only attributed to your person, and denied to your writings; for they are everywhere so full of candor, that, like Horace, you only expose the follies of men, without arraigning their vices; and in this excel him, that you add that pointedness of thought, which is visibly wanting in our great Roman. There is more of salt in all your verses than I have seen in any of the moderns, or even of the ancients; but you have been sparing of the gall, by which means you have pleas'd all readers, and offended none. Doune alone, of all our countrymen, had your talent; but was not happy enough to arrive at your versification; and were he translated into numbers, and English, he would yet be wanting in the dignity of expression. That which is the prime virtue, and chief ornament, of Virgil, which distinguishes him from the rest of writers, is so conspicuous in your verses, that it casts a shadow on all your contemporaries; we cannot be seen, or but obscurely, while you are present. You equal Donne in the variety, multiplicity, and choice of thoughts; you excel him in the manner and the words. I read you both with the same admiration, but not with the same delight. He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should ingage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love. In this (if I may be pardon'd for so bold a truth) Mr. Cowley has copied him to a fault; so great a one, in my opinion, that it throws his Mistress infinitely below his Pindarics and his latter compositions, which are undoubtedly the best of his poems, and the most correct. For my own part, I must avow it freely to the world, that I never attempted anything in satire,

wherein I have not studied your writings as the most perfect model. I have continually laid them before me; and the greatest commendation which my own partiality can give to my productions, is, that they are copies, and no farther to be allow'd, than as they have something more or less of the original. Some few touches of your Lordship, some secret graces which I have endeavor'd to express after your manner, have made whole poems of mine to pass with approbation; but take your verses altogether, and they are inimitable. If therefore I have not written better, 't is because you have not written more. You have not set me sufficient copy to transcribe; and I cannot add one letter of my own invention, of which I have not the example there.

'Tis a general complaint against your Lordship, and I must have leave to upbraid you with it, that, because you need not write, you will not. Mankind, that wishes you so well in all things that relate to your prosperity, have their intervals of wishing for themselves, and are within a little of grudging you the fulness of your fortune: they would be more malicious if you us'd it not so well, and with so much generosity.

Fame is in itself a real good, if we may believe Cicero, who was perhaps too fond of it; but even fame, as Virgil tells us, acquires strength by going forward. Let Epicurus give indolency as an attribute to his gods, and place in it the happiness of the blest; the divinity which we worship has given us not only a precept against it, but his own example to the contrary. The world, my Lord, would be content to allow you a seventh day for rest; or if you thought that hard upon you, we would not refuse you half your time: if you came out, like some great monarch, to take a town but once a year, as it were for your diversion, tho' you had no need to extend your territories. In short, if you were a bad, or, which is worse, an indifferent poet, we would thank you for our own quiet, and not expose you to the want of yours. But when you are so great and so successful, and when we have that necessity of your writing, that we cannot subsist in poetry without it, any more (I may almost say) than the world without the daily course of

ordinary providence, methinks this argument might prevail with you, my Lord, to forego a little of your repose for the public benefit. 'Tis not that you are under any force of working daily miracles, to prove your being; but now and then somewhat of extraordinary, that is, anything of your production, is requisite to refresh your char

acter.

This, I think, my Lord, is a sufficient reproach to you; and should I carry it as far as mankind would authorise me, would be little less than satire. And, indeed, a provocation is almost necessary, in behalf of the world, that you might be induc'd sometimes to write; and in relation to a multitude of scribblers, who daily pester the world with their insufferable stuff, that they might be discourag'd from writing any more. I complain not of their lampoons and libels, tho' I have been the public mark for many years. I am vindictive enough to have repell'd force by force, if I could imagine that any of them had ever reach'd me; but they either shot at rovers, and therefore miss'd, or their powder was so weak, that I might safely stand them, at the nearest distance. I answer'd not The Rehearsal, because I knew the author sate to himself when he drew the picture, and was the very Bayes of his own farce; because also I knew that my betters were more concern'd than I was in that satire; and, lastly, because Mr. Smith and Mr. Johnson, the main pillars of it, were two such languishing gentlemen in their conversation, that I could liken them to nothing but to their own relations, those noble characters of men of wit and pleasure about the town. The like considerations have hinder'd me from dealing with the lamentable companions of their prose and doggrel. I am so far from defending my poetry against them, that I will not so much as expose theirs. And for my morals, if they are not proof against their attacks, let me be thought by posterity, what those authors would be thought, if any memory of them, or of their writings, could endure so long as to another age. But these dull makers of lampoons, as harmless as they have been to me, are yet of dangerous example to the public. Some witty men may perhaps succeed to their designs, and, mixing sense with malice, blast the reputation