For I confess my chief endeavours are _to delight the Age in which I live_ [p. 582]. If the Humour of this, be for Low Comedy, small Accidents [_Incidents_], and Raillery; I will force my genius to obey it: though, with more reputation, I could write in Verse. I know, I am not so fitted, by nature, to write Comedy. I want that gaiety of Humour which is required to it. My conversation is dull and slow. My Humour is saturnine and reserved. In short, I am none of those, who endeavour to break jests in company, or make repartees. So that those who decry my Comedies, do me no injury, except it be in point of profit. Reputation in _them_ is the last thing to which I shall pretend. I beg pardon for entertaining the reader with so ill a subject: but before I quit that argument, which was the cause of this digression; I cannot but take notice how I am corrected for my quotation of SENECA, in my defence of Plays in Verse. My words were these [p. 570]: "Our language is noble, full, and significant; and I know not why he, who is master of it, may not clothe ordinary things in it, as decently as the Latin; if he use the same diligence in his _choice of words_." One would think, "Unlock the door," was a thing as vulgar as could be spoken: yet SENECA could make it sound high and lofty in his Latin. _Reserate clusos regii postes Laris_. But he says of me, _That being filled with the precedents of the Ancients who Writ their Plays in Verse, I commend the thing; declaring our language to be full, noble, and significant, and charging all the defects upon the_ ill placing of words; _which I prove by quoting SENECA's loftily expressing such an ordinary thing as_ shutting the door. Here he manifestly mistakes. For I spoke not of the Placing, but the Choice of words: for which I quoted that aphorism of JULIUS CAESAR, _Delectus verborum est origo eloquentiae_. But _delectus verborum_ is no more Latin for the "Placing of words;" than _Reserate_ is Latin for "_Shut_ the door!" as he interprets it; which I, ignorantly, construed "_Unlock_ or _open_ it!" He supposes I was highly affected with the Sound of these words; and I suppose I may more justly imagine it of him: for if he had not been extremely satisfied with the Sound, he would have minded the Sense a little better. But these are, now, to be no faults. For, ten days after his book was published, and that his mistakes are grown so famous that they are come back to him, he sends his _Errata_ to be printed, and annexed to his Play; and desires that instead of _Shutting_, you should read _Opening_, which, it seems, was the printer's fault. I wonder at his modesty! that he did not rather say it was SENECA's or mine: and that in some authors, _Reserate_ was to _Shut_ as well as to _Open_, as the word _Barach_, say the learned, is [_in Hebrew_] both to _Bless_ and _Curse_. Well, since it was the printer['s fault]; he was a naughty man, to commit the same mistake twice in six lines.