fame. For my own part, I, who
am the least amongst the poets, have yet the fortune to be honoured
with the best patron, and the best friend. For, (to omit some great
persons of our court, to whom I am many ways obliged, and who have
taken care of me even amidst the exigencies of a war[3]) I can make my
boast to have found a better Maecenas in the person of my Lord
Treasurer Clifford[4], and a more elegant Tibullus in that of Sir
Charles Sedley. I have chosen that poet to whom I would resemble you,
not only because I think him at least equal, if not superior, to Ovid
in his elegies; nor because of his quality, for he was, you know, a
Roman knight, as well as Ovid; but for his candour, his wealth, his
way of living, and particularly because of this testimony which is
given him by Horace, which I have a thousand times in my mind applied
to you:

_Non tu corpus eras sine pectore: Dii tibi formam,
Dii tibi divitias dederant, artemque fruendi.
Quid voveat dulci nutricula majus alumno,
Quam sapere, et fari possit quae sentiat, et cui
Gratia, forma, valetudo contingat abunde;
Et mundus victus, non deficiente crumena?_

Certainly the poets of that age enjoyed much happiness in the
conversation and friendship of one another. They imitated the best way
of living, which was, to pursue an innocent and inoffensive pleasure,
that which one of the ancients called _eruditam voluptatem_. We have,
like them, our genial nights, where our discourse is neither too
serious nor too light, but always pleasant, and, for the most part,
instructive; the raillery, neither too sharp upon the present, nor too
censorious on the absent; and the cups only such as will raise the
conversation of the night, without disturbing the business of the
morrow[5]. And thus far not only the philosophers, but the fathers of
the church, have gone, without lessening their reputation of good
manners, or of piety. For this reason, I have often laughed at the
ignorant and ridiculous descriptions which some pedants have given of
the wits, as they are pleased to call them; which are a generation of
men as unknown to them, as the people of Tartary, or the Terra
Australia, are to us. And therefore as we draw giants and
anthropophagi in those vacancies of our maps, where we have not
travelled to discover better; so those wretches paint lewdness,
atheism, folly, ill-reasoning, and all manner of extravagancies
amongst us, for want of understanding what we are.