INTRODUCTION.

IT is agreed on all hands, that the antients are our masters in the art of composition. Such of their writings, therefore, as deliver instructions for the exercise of this art, must be of the highest value. And, if any of them hath acquired a credit, in this respect, superior to the rest, it is, perhaps, the following work which the learned have long since considered as a kind of summary of the rules of good writing; to be gotten by heart by every young student; and to whose decisive authority the greatest masters in taste and composition must finally submit.

But the more unquestioned the credit of this poem is, the more it will concern the public, that it be justly and accurately understood. The writer of these sheets then believed it might be of use, if he took some pains to clear the sense, connect the method, and ascertain the scope and purpose, of this admired epistle. Others, he knew indeed, and some of the first fame for critical learning, had been before him in this attempt. Yet he did not find

himself prevented by their labours; in which, besides innumerable lesser faults, he, more especially, observed two inveterate errors, of such a sort, as must needs perplex the genius, and distress the learning of any commentator. The one of these respects the SUBJECT; the other, the METHOD of the Art of poetry. It will be necessary to say something upon each.

1. That the Art of poetry, at large, is not the proper subject of this piece, is so apparent, that it hath not escaped the dullest and least attentive of its critics.

For, however all the different kinds of poetry might appear to enter into it, yet every one saw, that some at least were very slightly considered: whence the frequent attempts, the artes et institutiones poeticæ, of writers both at home and abroad, to supply its deficiencies. But, though this truth was seen and confessed, it unluckily happened, that the sagacity of his numerous commentators went no further. They still considered this famous epistle as a collection, though not a system, of criticisms on poetry in general; with this concession however, that the stage had evidently the largest share in ita. Under the influence of this prejudice, several writers of name took upon them to comment and explain it: and with the success, which was to be expected from so fatal a mistake on setting out, as the not seeing, "that the proper and sole purpose of the

a Satyra hæc est in sui sæculi poetas, PRÆCIPUE vero in Ramanum drama. Baxter.

"author, was, not to abridge the Greek critics, "whom he probably never thought of; nor to "amuse himself with composing a short critical

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system, for the general use of poets, which every " line of it absolutely confutes; but, simply to criti"cize the ROMAN DRAMA." For to this end, not the tenor of the work only, but, as will appear, every single precept in it, ultimately refers. The mischiefs of this original error have been long felt. It hath occasioned a constant perplexity in defining the general method, and in fixing the import of particular rules. Nay its effects have reached still further. For, conceiving as they did, that the whole had been composed out of the Greek critics, the labour and ingenuity of its interpreters have been misemployed in picking out authorities, which were not wanted, and in producing, or, more properly, by their studied refinements in creating, conformities, which were never designed. Whence it hath come to pass, that, instead of investigating the order of the poet's own reflexions, and scrutinizing the peculiar state of the Roman stage (the methods, which common sense and common criticism would prescribe) the world hath been nauseated with insipid lectures on Aristotle and Phalereus; whose solid sense hath been so attenuated and subtilized by the delicate operation of French criticism, as hath even gone some way towards bringing the art itself into disrepute.

2. But the wrong explications of this poem have

arisen, not from the misconception of the subject only, but from an inattention to the METHOD of it. The latter was, in part, the genuin consequence of the former. For, not suspecting an unity of design in the subject, its interpreters never looked for, or could never find a consistency of disposition in the method. And this was indeed the very block upon which HEINSIUS, and, before him, JULIUS SCALIGER, himself, stumbled. These illustrious critics, with all the force of genius, which is required to disembarrass an involved subject, and all the aids of learning, that can lend a ray to enlighten a dark one, have, notwithstanding, found themselves utterly unable to unfold the order of this epistle; inso much, that SCALIGER, hath boldly pronounced the conduct of it to be vicious; and HEINSIUS, had no other way to evade the charge, than by recurring to the forced and uncritical expedient of a licentious transposition. The truth is, they were both in one common error, That the poet's purpose had been to write a criticism of the art of poetry at large, and not, as is here shewn, of the Roman drama in particular. But there is something more to be observed, in the case of HEINSIUS. For, as will be made appear in the notes on particular places, this critic did not pervert the order of the piece, from a simple mistake about the drift of the subject, but, also, from a total inapprehension of the genuin charm and beauty of the epistolary method. And, be

b Præf. in LIB. POET. et l. vi. p. 338.