to be believed, that the
excellency of the subject contributed much to the happiness of the
execution; and that the weight of thirty years was taken off me while I
was writing. I swam with the tide, and the water under me was buoyant.
The reader will easily observe that I was transported by the multitude
and variety of my similitudes; which are generally the product of a
luxuriant fancy, and the wantonness of wit. Had I called in my judgment
to my assistance, I had certainly retrenched many of them. But I defend
them not; let them pass for beautiful faults amongst the better sort of
critics: for the whole poem, though written in that which they call
Heroic verse, is of the Pindaric nature, as well in the thought as the
expression; and, as such, requires the same grains of allowance for it.
It was intended, as your lordship sees in the title, not for an elegy,
but a panegyric: a kind of apotheosis, indeed, if a heathen word may be
applied to a Christian use. And on all occasions of praise, if we take
the ancients for our patterns, we are bound by prescription to employ
the magnificence of words, and the force of figures, to adorn the
sublimity of thoughts. Isocrates amongst the Grecian orators, and
Cicero, and the younger Pliny, amongst the Romans, have left us their
precedents for our security; for I think I need not mention the
inimitable Pindar, who stretches on these pinions out of sight, and is
carried upward, as it were, into another world.

This, at least, my lord, I may justly plead, that if I have not
performed so well as I think I have, yet I have used my best endeavours
to excel myself. One disadvantage I have had; which is, never to have
known or seen my lady: and to draw the lineaments of her mind, from the
description which I have received from others, is for a painter to set
himself at work without the living original before him: which, the more
beautiful it is, will be so much the more difficult for him to conceive,
when he has only a relation given him of such and such features by an
acquaintance or a friend, without the nice touches, which give the best
resemblance, and make the graces of the picture. Every artist is apt
enough to flatter himself (and I amongst the rest) that their own ocular
observations would have discovered more perfections, at least others,
than have been delivered to them: though I have received mine from the
best hands, that is, from persons who neither want a just understanding
o