imprinted the same year] first came out in the year 1660, I have seen them read it in the midst of Change time.  Nay, so vehement were they at it, that they lost their bargain by the candles’ ends!  But what will you say, if he has been received among the Great Ones?  I can assure you, he is, this day, the envy of a Great Person, who is Lord in the Art of Quibbling; and who does not take it well, than any man should intrude so far into his province.”

“All I would wish,” replied CRITES, “is that they who love his writings, may still admire him and his fellow poet. Qui Bavium non odit &c., is curse sufficient.”

“And farther,” added LISIDEIUS; “I believe there is no man who writes well; but would think himself very hardly dealt with, if their admirers should praise anything of his. Nam quos contemnimus eorum quoque laudes contemnimus.”

“There are so few who write well, in this Age,” said CRITES, “that methinks any praises should be welcome.  They neither rise to the dignity of the last Age, nor to any of the Ancients:  and we may cry out of the Writers of this Time, with more reason than PETRONIUS of his, Pace vestra liceat dixisse, primi omnium eloquentiam perdidistis!  ’You have debauched the true old Poetry so far, that Nature (which is the Soul of it) is not in any of your writings!’”

“If your quarrel,” said EUGENIUS, “to those who now write, be grounded only upon your reverence to Antiquity; there is no man more ready to adore those great Greeks and Romans than I am:  but, on the other side, I cannot think so contemptibly of the Age I live in, or so dishonourably of my own Country as not to judge [that] we equal the Ancients in most kinds of Poesy, and in some, surpass them; neither know I any reason why I may not be as zealous for the reputation of our Age, as we find the Ancients themselves, in reference to those who lived before them.  For you hear HORACE saying

    “Indignor quidquam reprehendi, non quia crasse
    Compositum, ille pide’ve putetur, sed quia nuper.

“And, after,

    “Si meliora dies, ut vina, poemata reddit,
    Scire velim pretium chartis quotus arroget annus?_

“But I see I am engaging in a wide dispute, where the arguments are not like[ly] to reach close, on either side [p. 497]:  for Poesy is of so large extent, and so many (both of the Ancients and Moderns) have done well in all kinds of it, that, in citing one against the other, we shall take up more time this evening, than each man’s occasions will allow him.  Therefore, I would ask CRITES to what part of Poesy, he would confine his arguments? and whether he would defend the general cause of the Ancients against the Moderns; or oppose any Age of the Moderns against this of ours?”

CRITES, a little while considering upon this demand, told EUGENIUS, he approved of his propositions; and, if he pleased, he would limit their dispute to Dramatic Poesy:  in which, he thought it not difficult to prove, either that the Ancients were superior to the Moderns; or the last Age to this of ours.