Yet I wonder not your Lordship succeeds so well in this attempt.  The knowledge of men is your daily practice in the world.  To work and bend their stubborn minds; which go not all after the same grain, but, each of them so particular a way, that the same common humours, in several persons, must be wrought upon by several means.

Thus, my Lord! your sickness is but the imitation of your health; the Poet but subordinate to the Statesman in you.  You still govern men with the same address, and manage business with the same prudence:  allowing it here, as in the world, the due increase and growth till it comes to the just height; and then turning it, when it is fully ripe, and Nature calls out (as it were) to be delivered.  With this only advantage of ease to you, in your Poetry:  that you have Fortune, here, at your command:  with which, Wisdom does often unsuccessfully struggle in the world.  Here is no Chance, which you have not foreseen.  All your heroes are more than your subjects, they are your creatures:  and, though they seem to move freely, in all the sallies of their passions; yet, you make destinies for them, which they cannot shun.  They are moved, if I may dare to say so, like the rational creatures of the Almighty Poet; who walk at liberty, in their own opinion, because their fetters are invincible:  when, indeed, the Prison of their Will is the more sure, for being large; and instead of an Absolute Power over their actions, they have only a Wretched Desire of doing that, which they cannot choose but do.

I have dwelt, my Lord! thus long, upon your Writing; not because you deserve not greater and more noble commendations, but because I am not equally able to express them in other subjects.  Like an ill swimmer, I have willingly stayed long in my own depth; and though I am eager of performing more, yet I am loath to venture out beyond my knowledge.  For beyond your Poetry, my Lord! all is Ocean to me.

To speak of you as a Soldier, or a Statesman, were only to betray my own ignorance:  and I could hope no better success from it, than that miserable Rhetorician had, who solemnly declaimed before HANNIBAL “of the Conduct of Armies, and the Art of War.”  I can only say, in general, that the Souls of other men shine out at little cranies; they understand some one thing, perhaps, to admiration, while they are darkened on all the other parts:  but your Lordship’s Soul is an entire Globe of Light, breaking out on every side; and if I have only discovered one beam of it, ’tis not that the light falls unequally, but because the body which receives it, is of unequal parts.

The acknowledgement of which, is a fair occasion offered me, to retire from the consideration of your Lordship to that of myself.  I here present you, my Lord! with that in Print, which you had the goodness not to dislike upon the Stage; and account it happy to have met you here in England:  it being, at best, like small wines, to be drunk out upon the place [i.e., of vintage, where produced]; and has not body enough to endure the sea.