And eke I pray Jesus to short hir lives That wol not be governed by hir wives; And old and angry nigards of dispence God send hem sone a veray pestilence. TRANSLATIONS FROM OVID'S EPISTLES. PREFACE TO THE TRANSLATION OF OVID'S EPISTLES.[2] The Life of Ovid being already written in our language, before the translation of his Metamorphoses, I will not presume so far upon myself, to think I can add any thing to Mr Sandys his undertaking.[3] The English reader may there be satisfied, that he flourished in the reign of Augustus Cæsar; that he was extracted from an ancient family of Roman knights; that he was born to the inheritance of a splendid fortune;[4] that he was designed to the study of the law, and had made considerable progress in it, before he quitted that profession, for this of poetry, to which he was more naturally formed. The cause of his banishment is unknown; because he was himself unwilling further to provoke the emperor, by ascribing it to any other reason than what was pretended by Augustus, which was, the lasciviousness of his Elegies, and his Art of Love.[5] It is true, they are not to be excused in the severity of manners, as being able to corrupt a larger empire, if there were any, than that of Rome; yet this may be said in behalf of Ovid, that no man has ever treated the passion of love with so much delicacy of thought, and of expression, or searched into the nature of it more philosophically than he. And the emperor, who condemned him, had as little reason as another man to punish that fault with so much severity, if at least he were the author of a certain epigram, which is ascribed to him, relating to the cause of the first civil war betwixt himself and Mark Antony the triumvir, which is more fulsome than any passage I have met with in our poet.[6]