If you would set us more copies, your
example would make all precepts needless. In the meantime that
little you have written is owned, and that particularly by the poets
(who are a nation not over-lavish of praise to their
contemporaries), as a principal ornament of our language; but the
sweetest essences are always confined in the smallest glasses.
When I speak of your lordship, it is never a digression, and
therefore I need beg no pardon for it, but take up Segrais where I
left him, and shall use him less often than I have occasion for him.
For his preface is a perfect piece of criticism, full and clear, and
digested into an exact method; mine is loose and, as I intended it,
epistolary. Yet I dwell on many things which he durst not touch,
for it is dangerous to offend an arbitrary master, and every patron
who has the power of Augustus has not his clemency. In short, my
lord, I would not translate him because I would bring you somewhat
of my own. His notes and observations on every book are of the same
excellency, and for the same reason I omit the greater part.
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