How's this, you cry? an actor write? we know it; PROLOGUE TO KING ARTHUR, Can write just level to your humble sense; So have I seen, in hall of knight, or lord, Come in good time, to make more work for EPILOGUE TO HENRY II. BY MR. MOUNTFORT, 1693. SPOKEN BY MRS. BRACEGIRDLE. [say, THUS you the sad catastrophe have seen, I guess your minds: the mistress would be taken,* And nauseous matrimony sent a packing. Chapels of ease behind our scenes you find. -the mistress would be taken, And nauseous matrimony sent a packing.] The incident of Lady Easy's throwing her handkerchief over Sir Charles's head, whilst he was sleeping, seems to have been taken from the Memoirs of Bassompiere, concerning a Count d'Orgevillier and his mistress. tom. ii. p. 6. 1728. at Amsterdam. Dr. J. W. Though for your love, perhaps, I should not care, I could not hate a man that bids me fair. For should you letters of reprisal seal, These men write that which no man else would steal. PROLOGUE TO ALBUMAZAR. To say, this comedy pleased long ago, Who, in this anarchy of wit, rob all, [word: 'T is all his own, when once he has spit i' the AN EPILOGUE. You saw our wife was chaste, yet thoroughly tried, And, without doubt, you 're hugely edified; 'T is Covent Garden drawn in Bridges street. chase: Pinch you but in one vice, away you fly [pace. She puffs, and hardly keeps your Protean vices To some new frisk of contrariety. EPILOGUE TO THE HUSBAND HIS OWN CUCKOLD.* LIKE some raw sophister that mounts the pulpit, So trembles a young Poet at a full pit. • This comedy was written by John Dryden, jun., our author's second son. It was acted at the theatre in Lincoln's-inn-fields, in 1696. D. Unus'd to crowds, the person quakes for fear, And wonders how the devil he durst come there; Wanting three talents needful for the place, Some beard, some learning, and some little grace: Nor is the puny Poet void of care; And as for grace, to tell the truth, there's scarce one But has as little as the very Parson : Both say, they preach and write for your instruction: But 't is for a third day, and for induction. ment: Wit's not his business, and as wit now goes, • The poets gain is ne'er beyond his day] Dryden did not receive for his plays from the book seller above 552. The third night brought about 70%. The dedication five or ten guineas perhaps. Tonson paid Sir Richard Steel for Addison's Drummer, 502. 1715. And Dr. Young received 50l. for his Revenge. 7121. Southerene, for his Spartan Dame, in 1722, had 120, and now it is 100l. and 150. There were -plays on Sundays till the third year of Charles the First's reign. Otway had but one benefit for the play. Southerne was the first who had two benefits from a new representation. Farquhar had three for the Constant Couple in 1700. Three of Ben Jonson's plays, Sejanus, Cataline, and the New Inne, and two of Beaumont and Fletcher's, viz. The Faithful Shepherdess, and the Knight of the Burning Pestle, were damned the first night. Even the Silent wordan had like to have been condemned. Dr. J. W. PROLOGUE TO THE PILGRIM.* REVIVED FOR OUR AUTHOR'S BENEFIT, ANNO. 1700. How wretched is the fate of those who write! Lugg'd by the critic, baited by the beau. [grees Quack Maurus, though he never took deIn either of our universities; Yet to be shown by some kind wit he looks, Because he play'd the fool, and writ three books. But, if he would be worth a Poet's pen. He must be more a fool, and write again : For all the former fustian stuff he wrote Was dead-born doggerel, or is quite forgot; His man of Uz, stript of his Hebrew robe, Is just the proverb, and As poor as Job One would have thought he could no longer jog; But Arthur was a level, Job's a bog. There, though he crept, yet still he kept in sight; But here, he founders in, and sinks downright. Had he prepar'd us, and been dull by rule, Tobit had first been turn'd to ridicule : But our bold Briton, without fear or awe, O'erleaps at once the whole Apocrypha; [room Invades the Psalms with rhymes, and leaves no For any Vandal Hopkins yet to come. But when, if after all, this godly geer Is not so senseless as it would appear; Our mountebank has laid a deeper train, His cant, like Merry Andrew's noble vein, Catcalls the sects to draw 'em in again. At leisure hours, in epic song he deals, Writes to the rumbling of his coach's wheels, Prescribes in haste, and seldom kills by rule, But rides triumphant between stool and stool. This play, with alterations by Sir John Vanbrugh, and a secular masque, together with this prologue and an epilogue written by our author, was revived for his benefit in 1700, his fortune being at that time in as declining a state as his health; they were both spoken by Mr. Cibber, then a very young actor, much to Dryden's satisfac tion. D Well, let him go; 't is yet too early day, To get himself a place in farce or play. [him, We know not by what name we should arraign For no one category can contain him; A pedant, canting preacher, and a quack, Are load enough to break one ass's back : At last grown wanton, he presum'd to write, Traduc'd two kings, their kindness to requite: One made the doctor, and one dubb'd the knight. What would you say, if we should first begin While you have still your Oates, and we our EPILOGUE TO THE PILGRIM.* PERHAPS the parson stretch'd a point too far, fraught, The seeds of open vice, returning, brought. * Thus did the thriving malady prevail, • Dryden in this epilogue labours to throw the fault of the licentiousness of dramatic writers, which had been so severely censured by the Rev. Jeremy Collier,upon the example of a court returned from banishment, accompanied by all the vices and follies of foreign climates; and whom to please was the poet's business, as he wrote to eat. D. TRANSLATIONS FROM THEOCRITUS, LUCRETIUS, AND HORACE. PREFACE TO THE SECOND FOR this last half year I have been troubled with the disease (as I may call it) of translation. The cold prose fits of it, which are always the most tedious with me, were spent in the History of the League; the hot, which succeeded them, in this volume of Verse Miscellanies. The truth is, I fancied to myself, a kind of ease in the change of the paroxysm; never suspecting but the humour would have wasted itself in two or three pastorals of Theocritus, and as many odes of Horace. But finding, or at least thinking I found, something that was more pleasing in them than my ordinary productions, I encouraged myself to renew my old acquaintance with Lucretius and Virgil; and immediately fixed upon some parts of them, which had most affected me in the reading. These were my natural impulses for the undertaking; but there was an accidental motive which was full as forcible, and God forgive him who was the occasion of it. It was my Lord Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse; which made me uneasy till I tried whether or no I was capable of following his rules, and of reducing the speculation into practice. For many a fair precept in Poetry is like a seeming demonstration in the Mathematics, very specious in the diagram, but failing in the mechanic operation. I think I have generally observed his instruc tions; I am sure my reason is sufficiently convinced both of their truth and usefulness; which, in other words, is to confess no less a vanity, than to pretend that I have at least in some places made examples to his rules. Yet, withal I must acknowledge, that 1 have many times exceeded my commission; for I have both added and omitted, and even sometimes very boldly made such expositions of my authors, as no Dutch commentator will forgive me. Perhaps, in such particular passages, I have thought that I discovered some beauty yet undiscovered by those pedants, which none but a Poet could have found. Where I have taken away some of their expressions, and cut them shorter, it may possibly be on this consideration, that what was beautiful in the Greek or Latin, would not appear so shining in the English; and where I have enlarged them, I desire the false critics would not always think, that those thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the Poet, or may be fairly deduced from him; or at least, if both those considerations should fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an English man, they are such as he would probably have written. For, after all, a translator is to make his author appear as charming as possibly he can, provided he maintains his character, and makes him not unlike himself. Translation is a kind of drawing after the life, where every one will acknowledge there is a double sort of likeness, a good one and a bad. 'T is one thing to draw the outlines true, the features like, the proportions exact, the colouring itself perhaps tolerable; and another thing to make all these graceful, by the posture, the shadowings, and chiefly by the spirit which animates the whole. I cannot, without some indignation, look on an ill copy of an excellent original. Much less can I behold with patience Virgil, Homer, and some others, whose beauties I have been endeavouring all my life to imitate, so abused, as I may say, to their faces, by a botching interpreter. What English readers, unacquainted with Greek or Latin, will believe me, or any other man, when we commend those authors, and confess we derive all that is pardonable in us from their fountains, if they take those to be the same poets, whom our Ogilbys have translated? But I dare assure them, that a good Poet is no more like himself, in a dull translation, than his carcass would be to his living body. There are many, who understand Greek and Latin, and yet are ignorant of their mother tongue. The proprieties and delicacies of the English are known to few: 't is impossible even for a good wit to understand and practise them, without the help of a liberal education, long reading, and digesting of those few good authors we have amongst us, the knowledge of men and manners, the freedom of habitudes and conversation with the best company of both sexes; and, in short, without wearing off the rust which he contracted, while he was laying in a stock of learning. Thus difficult it is to understand the purity of English, and critically to discern not only good writers from bad, and a proper style from a corrupt, but also to distinguish that which is pure in a good author, from that which is vicious and corrupt in him. And for want of all these requisites, or the greatest part of them, most of our ingenious young men take up some cried-up English Poet for their model, adore him and imitate him, as they think, without knowing wherein he is defective, where he is boyish and trifling wherein either his thoughts are improper to his subjects, or his expressions unworthy of his thoughts, or the turn of both is unharmonious. So Thus it appears necessary, that a man should be a nice critic in his mother-tongue, before he attempts to translate a foreign language. Neither is it sufficient, that he be able to judge of words and style; but he must be a master of them too: he must perfectly understand his author's tongue, and absolutely command his own. that, to be a thorough translator, he must be a thorough poet. Neither is it enough to give his author's sense in good English, in poetical expressions, and in musical numbers; for, though all these are exceeding difficult to perform, there yet remains a harder task; and 't is a secret of which few translators have suffici ently thought. I have already hinted a word or two concerning it; that is, the maintaining the character of an author, which distinguishes him from all others, and makes him appear that individual poet, whom you would interpret. For example, not only the thoughts, but the style and versification of Virgil and Ovid, are very different: yet I see, even in our best poets, who have translated some parts of them, that they have confounded their several talents; and, by endeavouring only at the sweetness and harmony of numbers, have made them both so much alike, that if I did not know the originals, I should never be able to judge by the copies, which was Virgil, and which was Ovid. It was objected against a late noble painter,* that he drew many graceful pictures, but few of them were like. And this happened to him, because he always studied himself, more than those who sat to him. In such translators I can easily distinguish the hand which performed the work, but I cannot distinguish their poet from another. Suppose two authors are equally sweet, yet there is a great distinction to be made in sweetness, as that in sugar, and that of honey. I can 'Sir P. Lely. |