it; they were scholars, it is true, but they were pedants; and, for a just reward of their pedantic pains, all their translations want to be translated into English. If I flatter not myself, or if my friends have not flattered me, I have given my author's sense for the most part truly; for, to mistake sometimes is incident to all men; and not to follow the Dutch commentators always, may be forgiven to a man, who thinks them, in the general, heavy gross-witted fellows, fit only to gloss on their own dull poets. But I leave a farther satire on their wit, till I have a better opportunity to show how much I love and honour them. I have likewise attempted to restore Ovid to his native sweetness, easiness, and smoothness; and to give my poetry a kind of cadence, and, as we call it, a run of verse, as like the original, as the English can come up to the Latin. As he seldom uses any synalephas, so I have endeavoured to avoid them as often as I could. I have likewise given him his own turns, both on the words and on the thought; which I cannot say are inimitable, because I have copied them, and so may others, if they use the same diligence; but certainly they are wonderfully graceful in this poet. Since I have named the synalepha, which is the cutting off one vowel immediately before another, I will give an example of it from Chapman's "Homer," which lies before me, for the benefit of those who understand not the _Latin prosodia_. It is in the first line of the argument to the first Iliad: Apollo's priest to th' Argive fleet doth bring, &c. There, we see, he makes it not, _the Argive_, but _th' Argive_, to shun the shock of the two vowels, immediately following each other; but, in his second argument, in the same page, he gives a bad example of the quite contrary kind: Alpha the prayer of Chryses sings: The army's plague, the strife of kings. In these words, _the army's,--the_ ending with a vowel, and _armies_ beginning with another vowel, without cutting off the first, which by it had been _th' armies_, there remains a most horrible ill-sounding gap betwixt those words. I cannot say that I have every where observed the rule of the synalepha in my translation; but wheresoever I have not, it is a fault in sound. The French and the Italians have made it an inviolable precept in their versification; therein following the severe example of the Latin poets. Our countrymen have not yet reformed their poetry so far, but content themselves with following the licentious practice of the Greeks; who, though they sometimes use synalephas, yet make no difficulty, very often, to sound one vowel upon another; as Homer does, in the very first line of Alpha: Μήνιν ἄειδε, Θεὰ, Πηληιάδεω Ἀχιλῆος