But, lest you should, your mantle leave behind. Encourage him to tope; but kiss him not, Nor mix one drop of water in his pot. If he be fuddled well, and snores apace, Then we may take advice from time and place. When all depart, when compliments are loud, Be sure to mix among the thickest crowd; There I will be, and there we cannot miss, Perhaps to grubble, or at least to kiss. Alas! what length of labour I employ, Just to secure a short and transient joy! For night must part us; and when night is come, Tucked underneath his arm he leads you home. He locks you in; I follow to the door, His fortune envy, and my own deplore. He kisses you, he more than kisses too; The outrageous cuckold thinks it all his due. But add not to his joy by your consent, And let it not be given, but only lent. Return no kiss, nor move in any sort; Make it a dull and a malignant sport. Had I my wish, he should no pleasure take, But slubber o'er your business for my sake; And whate'er fortune shall this night befal, Coax me to-morrow, by forswearing all. PREFACE ON TRANSLATION, PREFIXED TO DRYDEN's SECOND MISCELLANY, PUBLISHED IN 1685. For this last half year I have been troubled with the disease (as I may call it) of translation. The cold prose fits of it, which are always the most tedious with me, were spent in the History of the League;[47] the hot, which succeeded them, in this volume of Verse Miscellanies. The truth is, I fancied to myself a kind of ease in the change of the paroxysm; never suspecting but that the humour would have wasted itself in two or three pastorals of Theocritus, and as many odes of Horace. But finding, or at least thinking I found, something that was more pleasing in them than my ordinary productions, I encouraged myself to renew my old acquaintance with Lucretius and Virgil; and immediately fixed upon some parts of them, which had most affected me in the reading. These were my natural impulses for the undertaking. But there was an accidental motive which was full as forcible, and God forgive him who was the occasion of it. It was my Lord Roscommon's "Essay on Translated Verse;"[48] which made me uneasy till I tried whether or no I was capable of following his rules, and of reducing the speculation into practice. For, many a fair precept in poetry is, like a seeming demonstration in the mathematics, very specious in the diagram, but failing in the mechanic operation. I think I have generally observed his instructions; I am sure my reason is sufficiently convinced both of their truth and usefulness; which, in other words, is to confess no less a vanity, than to pretend that I have, at least in some places, made examples to his rules. Yet, withal, I must acknowledge, that I have many times exceeded my commission; for I have both added and omitted, and even sometimes very boldly made such expositions of my