I have mark’d, as before, my Corrections at the Side; and I may venture to say, I have supported the faltring Verses both with _Numbers_ and _Sense_. But who ever heard of _Evante_, as the Name of a Man, in _Greece_? Neither is this Inscription a Piece of Ethnic Devotion, as Sir _George_ has suppos’d it, to a Statue erected to _Jupiter_: On the contrary, it despises those fruitless Superstitions. _Philo_ (a _Christian_, as it seems to me;) sets it up, in Thanks for a safe Voyage, to the _true God_. That all my Readers may equally share in this little Poem, I have attempted to put it into an _English_ Dress. Invoke who Will the prosp’rous Gale _behind_, _Jove_ at the _Prow_, while to the guiding Wind O’er the blue Billows he the Sail expands, Where _Neptune_ with each Wave heaps Hills of Sands: Then let him, when the Surge he backward plows, Pour to his Statue-God unaiding Vows: But to the God of Gods, for Deaths o’erpast, For Safety lent him on the watry Waste, To native Shores return’d, thus _Philo_ pays His Monument of Thanks, of grateful Praise. I shall have no Occasion, I believe, to ask the Pardon of _some_ Readers for these _Nine_ last Pages; and Others may be so kind to pass them over at their Pleasure. (Those Discoveries, which give Light and Satisfaction to the truly Learned, I must confess, are Darkness and Mystery to the less capable: Φέγγος μὲν ξυνετοῖς, ἀξυνετοῖς δ᾽ Ἐρεβος.) Nor will they be absolutely foreign, I hope, to a Preface in some Measure critical; especially, as it could not be amiss to shew, that I have read other Books with the same Accuracy, with which I profess to have read _Shakespeare_. Besides, I design’d this Inference from the Defence of Literal Criticism. If the _Latin_ and _Greek_ Languages have receiv’d the greatest Advantages imaginable from the Labours of the Editors and Criticks of the two last Ages; by whose Aid and Assistance the Grammarians have been enabled to write infinitely better in that Art than even the preceding Grammarians, who wrote when those Tongues flourish’d as living Languages: I should account it a peculiar Happiness, that, by the faint Assay I have made in this Work, a Path might be chalk’d out, for abler Hands, by which to derive the same Advantages to our own Tongue: a Tongue, which, tho’ it wants none of the fundamental Qualities of an universal Language, yet as a _noble Writer_ says, lisps and stammers as in its Cradle; and has produced little more towards its polishing than Complaints of its Barbarity. [Sidenote: The Delay of this Edition excused.]