Because I deal not in satyr, I have sent your Lordship a prologue and epilogue, which I made for our players, when they went down to Oxford. I hear they have succeeded; and by the event your Lordship will judge how easy ’tis to pass any thing upon an university, and how gross flattery the learned will endure.[67] If your Lordship had been in town, and I in the country, I durst not have entertained you with three pages of a letter; but I know they are very ill things which can be tedious to a man, who is fourscore miles from Covent Garden. ’Tis upon this confidence, that I dare almost promise to entertain you with a thousand _bagatelles_ every week, and not to be serious in any part of my letter, but that wherein I take leave to call myself your Lordship’s Most obedient servant, JOHN DRYDEN. LETTER III. _The following Note and Letter contains the determination of a dispute, and probably of a wager, which had been referred to our author by the parties. It concerns a passage in Creech’s “Lucretius,” and probably was written soon after the publication of that translation in 1682, when it was a recent subject of conversation. The full passage in “Lucretius” runs thus_: Præterea quæcunque vetustate amovet ætas, Si penitus perimit, consumens materiam omnem, Unde animale genus generatim in lumina vitæ Redducit Venus?---- _Which Creech thus renders_: _Besides, if o’er whatever years prevail Should wholly perish, and its matter fail, How could the powers of all kind Venus breed A constant race of animals to succeed?_ _The translation of Creech is at least complicated and unintelligible; and I am uncertain whether even Dryden’s explanation renders it grammatical. Dryden speaks elsewhere with great applause of Creech’s translation._ _The original of this decision (in Dryden’s hand-writing) is in the possession of Mrs White of Bownham-hall, Gloucestershire, and was most obligingly communicated to the editor by that lady, through the medium of Mr Constable of Edinburgh._ * * * * * The two verses, concerning which the dispute is rais’d, are these: Besides, if o’re whatever yeares prevaile Shou’d wholly perish, and its matter faile. The question arising from them is, whether any true grammatical construction can be made of them? The objection is, that there is no nominative case appearing to the word _perish_, or that can be understood to belong to it. I have considered the verses, and find the authour of them to have notoriously bungled; that he has plac’d the words as confus’dly as if he had studied to do so. This notwithstanding, the very words, without adding or diminishing in theire proper sence, (or at least what the authour meanes,) may run thus:--_Besides, if what ever yeares prevaile over, should wholly perish, and its matter faile._