At least but two can that good crime commit,
  Thou in design, and Wycherly in wit. 
  Let thy own Gauls condemn thee, if they dare; 40
  Contented to be thinly regular: 
  Born there, but not for them, our fruitful soil
  With more increase rewards thy happy toil. 
  Their tongue, enfeebled, is refined too much;
  And, like pure gold, it bends at every touch: 
  Our sturdy Teuton yet will art obey,
  More fit for manly thought, and strengthen’d with allay. 
  But whence art thou inspired, and thou alone,
  To flourish in an idiom not thy own? 
  It moves our wonder, that a foreign guest 50
  Should over-match the most, and match the best. 
  In under-praising thy deserts, I wrong;
  Here find the first deficience of our tongue: 
  Words, once my stock, are wanting, to commend
  So great a poet, and so good a friend.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 23:  ‘Motteux:’  an exiled Frenchman, translator of ’Don Quixote,’ and a play-wright.  Dryden alludes here to Collier’s attacks on himself.]

* * * * *

EPISTLE XIII.

TO MY HONOURED KINSMAN, JOHN DRYDEN,[24] OF CHESTERTON, IN THE COUNTY OF HUNTINGDON, ESQ.

  How bless’d is he who leads a country life,
  Unvex’d with anxious cares, and void of strife! 
  Who studying peace, and shunning civil rage,
  Enjoy’d his youth, and now enjoys his age: 
  All who deserve his love, he makes his own;
  And, to be loved himself, needs only to be known.

    Just, good, and wise, contending neighbours come,
  From your award to wait their final doom;
  And, foes before, return in friendship home. 
  Without their cost, you terminate the cause; 10
  And save the expense of long litigious laws: 
  Where suits are traversed; and so little won,
  That he who conquers, is but last undone: 
  Such are not your decrees; but so design’d,
  The sanction leaves a lasting peace behind;
  Like your own soul, serene; a pattern of your mind.

    Promoting concord, and composing strife,
  Lord of yourself, uncumber’d with a wife;
  Where, for a year, a month, perhaps a night,
  Long penitence succeeds a short delight:  20
  Minds are so hardly match’d, that even the first,
  Though pair’d by Heaven, in Paradise were cursed. 
  For man and woman, though in one they grow,
  Yet, first or last, return again to two. 
  He to God’s image, she to his was made;
  So farther from the fount the stream at random stray’d.

    How could he stand, when, put to double pain,
  He must a weaker than himself sustain! 
  Each might have stood perhaps; but each alone;
  Two wrestlers help to pull each other down. 30