peculiar goodness of the best of kings, that we may praise his subjects without offending him.  Doubtless, it proceeds from a just confidence of his own virtue, which the lustre of no other can be so great as to darken in him; for the good or the valiant are never safely praised under a bad or a degenerate prince.  But to return from this digression to a further account of my poem; I must crave leave to tell you, that as I have endeavoured to adorn it with noble thoughts, so much more to express those thoughts with elocution.  The composition of all poems is, or ought to be, of wit; and wit in the poet, or wit-writing (if you will give me leave to use a school-distinction) is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer, which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after:  or, without metaphor, which searches over all the memory for the species or ideas of those things which it designs to represent.  Wit written is that which is well designed, the happy result of thought, or product of imagination.  But to proceed from wit, in the general notion of it, to the proper wit of an heroic or historical poem; I judge it chiefly to consist in the delightful imaging of persons, actions, passions, or things.  It is not the jerk or sting of an epigram, nor the seeming contradiction of a poor antithesis (the delight of an ill-judging audience in a play of rhyme) nor the jingle of a more poor Paronomasia; neither is it so much the morality of a grave sentence, affected by Lucan, but more sparingly used by Virgil; but it is some lively and apt description, dressed in such colours of speech, that it sets before your eyes the absent object, as perfectly, and more delightfully than nature.  So then the first happiness of the poet’s imagination is properly invention or finding of the thought; the second is fancy, or the variation, deriving or moulding of that thought, as the judgment represents it proper to the subject; the third is elocution, or the art of clothing and adorning that thought, so found and varied, in apt, significant, and sounding words:  the quickness of the imagination is seen in the invention, the fertility in the fancy, and the accuracy in the expression.  For the two first of these, Ovid is famous among the poets; for the latter, Virgil.  Ovid images more often the movements and affections of the mind, either combating between two contrary passions, or extremely discomposed by one.  His words therefore are the least part of his care; for he pictures nature in disorder, with which the study and choice of words is inconsistent.  This is the proper wit of dialogue or discourse, and consequently of the drama, where all that is said is to be supposed the effect of sudden thought; which, though it excludes not the quickness of wit in repartees, yet admits not a too curious election of words, too frequent allusions, or use of tropes, or, in fine, anything that shows remoteness