the principles of a favourite art, and of acquiring a habit of versification, for which purpose the close and condensed style of the original seemed peculiarly calculated, especially when considered as a sort of school exercise. However, the task proved so difficult, that when I had gone through a part of it I remitted of my diligence, and proceeded at such separate intervals, that I had passed many posterior. productions through the press before this was brought to any conclusion in manuscript; and after it was so, it lay long. neglected, and would certainly have never been made publick, had not Sir Joshua Reynolds requested a sight of it, and made an obliging offer of illustrating it by a series of his own notes. prompted me to revise it with all possible accuracy; and as I had preserved the strictures which my late excellent friend Mr. Gray had made many years before on the version, as it then stood, I attended to each of them in their order with that deference which criticism

every

This

of his must demand. Besides this, as much more time was now elapsed since I had perused the copy, my own eye was become more open to its defects. I found the rule which my author had given to his Painter full as useful to

a writer :

(Ast ubi consilium deerit sapientis amici,

Id tempus dabit, atque mora intermissa labori.)

And I may say, with truth, that having become from this circumstance, as impartial, if not as fastidious, to my own work, as any other critick could possibly have been, I hardly left a single line in it without giving it, what I thought an emendation. It is not, therefore, as a juvenile work that I now present it to the publick, but as one which I have improved to the utmost of my mature abilities, in order to make it more worthy of its Annotator.

In the preceding Epistle I have obviated, I hope, every suspicion of arrogance in attempting this work after Mr. Dryden. The single

consideration that his version was in prose were in itself sufficient; because, as Mr. Pope has justly observed, verse and even rhyme is the best mode of conveying preceptive truths, "as in this way they are more shortly expressed, and more easily retained *." Still less need I make an apology for undertaking it after Mr. Wills, who in the year 1754, published a translation of it in metre without rhyme.

This Gentleman, a Painter by profession, assumed for his motto,

Tractant fabrilia fabri ;

* See his Advertisement before the Essay on Man,

+ I call it so rather than Blank Verse, because it was devoid of all harmony of numbers. The beginning, which I shall here insert, is a sufficient proof of the truth of this assertion: As Painting, Poesy, so similar

To Poesy be Painting; emulous

Alike, each to her sister doth refer,

Alternate change the office and the name;

Mute verse is this, that speaking picture call'd.

From this little specimen the reader will easily form a judgement of the whole.

but however adroit he might be in handling the tools of his own art, candour must own that the tools of a Poet and a translator were beyond his management: attempting also a task absolutely impossible, that of expressing the sense of his author in an equal number of lines, he produced a version, which (if it was ever read through by any person except myself) is now totally forgotten. Nevertheless I must do him the justice to own that he understood the original text; that he detected some errors in Mr. Dryden's translation, which had escaped Mr. Jervas (assisted, as it is said, by his friend Mr. Pope) in that corrected edition which Mr. Graham inscribed to the Earl of Burlington; and that I have myself sometimes profited by his labours. It is also from his edition that I reprint the following Life of the Author, which was drawn up from Felibien and other Biographers by the late Dr. Birch, who, with his usual industry, has collected all they have said on Fresnoy's subject.