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The wit of Greece, the gravity of Rome,
Appear exalted in the British loom :
The Muses' empire is restored again,

In Charles his reign, and by Roscommon's pen.
Yet modestly he does his work survey,
And calls a finished poem an essay;

For all the needful rules are scattered here;
Truth smoothly told, and pleasantly severe;
So well is art disguised, for nature to appear.

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Nor need those rules to give translation light; 35
His own example is a flame so bright,
That he, who but arrives to copy well,
Unguided will advance, unknowing will excel.
Scarce his own Horace could such rules ordain,
Or his own Virgil sing a nobler strain.

How much in him may rising Ireland boast,
How much in gaining him has Britain lost!
Their island in revenge has ours reclaimed;
The more instructed we, the more we still are
shamed.

'Tis well for us his generous blood did flow,
Derived from British channels long ago,*
That here his conquering ancestors were † nurst,
And Ireland but translated England first :
By this reprisal we regain our right,
Else must the two contending nations fight;
A nobler quarrel for his native earth,
Than what divided Greece for Homer's birth.
To what perfection will our tongue arrive,
How will invention and translation thrive,
When authors nobly born will bear their part,
And not disdain the inglorious praise of art!

But the Dillons

* Roscommon, it must be remembered, was born in Ireland, where his property also was situated. were of English extraction.

+ [Misprinted was in first edition. Tonson, vol. xviii.-ED.]

See Letter to

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*

Great generals thus, descending from command,
With their own toil provoke the soldier's hand.
How will sweet Ovid's ghost be pleased to hear
His fame augmented by an English peer;
How he embellishes his Helen's loves,
Outdoes his softness, and his sense improves ?
When these translate, and teach translators too,
Nor firstling kid, nor any vulgar vow,
Should at Apollo's grateful altar stand:
Roscommon writes; to that auspicious hand,
Muse, feed the bull that spurns the yellow sand.
Roscommon, whom both court and camps com-

mend,

True to his prince, and faithful to his friend;
Roscommon, first in fields of honour known,
First in the peaceful triumphs of the gown;
Who both Minervas justly makes his own.
Now let the few beloved by Jove, and they
Whom infused Titan formed of better clay,
On equal terms with ancient wit engage,
Nor mighty Homer fear, nor sacred Virgil's
page:

Our English palace opens wide in state,
And without stooping they may pass the gate.

* In this verse, which savours of the bathos, our author passes from Roscommon to Mulgrave, another "author nobly born," who about this time had engaged with Dryden and others in the version of Ovid's Epistles, published in 1680. The Epistle of Helen to Paris, alluded to in the lines which follow, was jointly translated by Mulgrave and Dryden, although the poet politely ascribes the whole merit to his noble coadjutor. See vol. xii. [Al. “a British.”—ED.]

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EPISTLE THE SEVENTH.

TO THE

DUCHESS OF YORK,

ON HER RETURN FROM SCOTLAND, IN THE YEAR 1682.

THESE Smooth and elegant lines are addressed to Mary of Este, second wife of James, Duke of York, and afterwards his Queen. She was at this time in all the splendour of beauty; tall, and admirably formed in her person; dignified and graceful in her deportment, her complexion very fair, and her hair and eyebrows of the purest black. Her personal charms fully merited the encomiastic strains of the following Epistle.

The Duchess accompanied her husband to Scotland, where he was sent into a kind of honorary banishment during the dependence of the Bill of Exclusion. Upon the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament, the Duke visited the court in triumph; and, after two months' stay, returned to Scotland, and in his voyage suffered the misfortune of shipwreck, elsewhere mentioned particularly.* Having settled the affairs of Scotland, he returned with his family to England, whence he had been virtually banished for three years. His return was hailed by the poets of the royal party with unbounded congratulation. It is celebrated by Tate, in the Second Part of "Absalom and Achitophel;"† and by our author, in a Prologue spoken before the Duke and Duchess.‡ But, not contented with that expression of zeal, Dryden paid the following additional tribute upon the same occasion. [Christie classes this as a Prologue, which indeed it is, and prints it in his "Three Political Prologues" with those given here at vol. x. p. 364. Its exact date is not clear, but must have been about the middle of 1682.-ED.]

* Vol. ix. p. 403.

+ Ibid.

‡ Vol. x. p. 364. Otway furnished an epilogue on the same night.

EPISTLE THE SEVENTH.

WHEN factious rage to cruel exile drove
The queen of beauty, and the court of love,
The Muses drooped, with their forsaken arts,
And the sad Cupids broke their useless darts;
Our fruitful plains to wilds and deserts turned,
Like Eden's face, when banished man it mourned.
Love was no more, when loyalty was gone,
The great supporter of his awful throne.
Love could no longer after beauty stay,
But wandered northward to the verge of day,
As if the sun and he had lost their way.
But now the illustrious nymph, returned again,
Brings every grace triumphant in her train.
The wondering Nereids, though they raised no
storm,

Foreslowed her passage, to behold her form:
Some cried, A Venus; some, A Thetis past;
But this was not so fair, nor that so chaste.
Far from her sight flew Faction, Strife, and
Pride;

And Envy did but look on her, and died.
Whate'er we suffered from our sullen fate,
Her sight is purchased at an easy rate.
Three gloomy years against this day were set;
But this one mighty sum has cleared the debt:
Like Joseph's dream, but with a better doom,
The famine past, the plenty still to come.

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For her, the weeping heavens become serene;
For her, the ground is clad in cheerful green;
For her, the nightingales are taught to sing,
And Nature has for her delayed the spring.
The Muse resumes her long-forgotten lays,
And Love restored his ancient realm surveys,
Recalls our beauties, and revives our plays,
His waste dominions peoples once again,
And from her presence dates his second reign.
But awful charms on her fair forehead sit,
Dispensing what she never will admit;
Pleasing, yet cold, like Cynthia's silver beam,
The people's wonder, and the poet's theme.
Distempered zeal, sedition, cankered hate,

No more shall vex the Church, and tear the

State;

No more shall faction civil discords move,
Or only discords of too tender love:
Discord, like that of music's various parts;
Discord, that makes the harmony of hearts;
Discord, that only this dispute shall bring,
Who best shall love the Duke, and serve the

King.

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