[Footnote 103: In the bloody battle of Landen, fought on 29th July, 1693, the Duke of Ormond was in that brigade of English horse which King William led in person to support his right wing of cavalry. The Duke charged at the head of a squadron of Lumley's regiment, received several wounds, and had his horse shot under him. He was about to be cut to pieces, when he was rescued by a gentleman of the gardes-du-corps, and made prisoner. King William lost the day, after exhibiting prodigies of conduct and valour.] PREFACE PREFIXED TO THE FABLES. It is with a poet, as with a man who designs to build, and is very exact, as he supposes, in casting up the cost beforehand; but, generally speaking, he is mistaken in his account, and reckons short in the expence 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.[104] 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 balk 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;[105] 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;[106] and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease.