account, and reckons short in the
expense he first intended. He alters his mind as the work proceeds, and
will have this or that convenience more, of which he had not thought
when he began. So has it happened to me: I have built a house, where I
intended but a lodge; yet with better success than a certain nobleman,
who, beginning with a dog-kennel, never lived to finish the palace he
had contrived.

From translating the first of Homer's Iliads (which I intended as an
essay to the whole work) I proceeded to the translation of the twelfth
book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, because it contains, among other things,
the causes, the beginning, and ending of the Trojan war. Here I ought in
reason to have stopped; but the speeches of Ajax and Ulysses lying next
in my way, I could not baulk them. When I had compassed them, I was so
taken with the former part of the fifteenth book, which is the
masterpiece of the whole Metamorphoses, that I enjoined myself the
pleasing task of rendering it into English. And now I found, by the
number of my verses, that they began to swell into a little volume;
which gave me an occasion of looking backward on some beauties of my
author, in his former books. There occurred to me the hunting of the
boar, Cinyras and Myrrha, the good-natured story of Baucis and Philemon,
with the rest, which I hope I have translated closely enough, and given
them the same turn of verse which they had in the original; and this, I
may say without vanity, is not the talent of every poet. He who has
arrived the nearest to it, is the ingenious and learned Sandys, the best
versifier of the former age; if I may properly call it by that name,
which was the former part of this concluding century. For Spenser and
Fairfax both flourished in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; great masters
in our language; and who saw much farther into the beauties of our
numbers, than those who immediately followed them. Milton was the
poetical son of Spenser, and Mr Waller of Fairfax; for we have our
lineal descents and clans, as well as other families. Spenser more than
once insinuates, that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body;
and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease.
Milton has acknowledged to me, that Spenser was his original; and many
besides myself have heard our famous Waller own, that he derived the
harmony of his numbers from the Godfrey of Bulloigne, which was turned
into English by Mr Fairfax. But to re