But all actions of your Grace are of a piece, as waters keep the tenor of their fountains:  your compassion is general, and has the same effect as well on enemies as friends.  It is so much in your nature to do good, that your life is but one continued act of placing benefits on many, as the sun is always carrying his light to some part or other of the world; and were it not that your reason guides you where to give, I might almost say that you could not help bestowing more than is consisting with the fortune of a private man or with the will of any but an Alexander.

What wonder is it, then, that being born for a blessing to mankind, your supposed death in that engagement was so generally lamented through the nation!  The concernment for it was as universal as the loss; and though the gratitude might be counterfeit in some, yet the tears of all were real:  where every man deplored his private part in that calamity, and even those who had not tasted of your favours, yet built so much on the fame of your beneficence, that they bemoaned the loss of their expectations.

This brought the untimely death of your great father into fresh remembrance:  as if the same decree had passed on two short successive generations of the virtuous; and I repeated to myself the same verses which I had formerly applied to him:  Ostendunt terris hunc tantum fata, nec ultra esse sinunt.  But to the joy, not only of all good men, but of mankind in general, the unhappy omen took not place.  You are still living to enjoy the blessings and applause of all the good you have performed, the prayers of multitudes whom you have obliged, for your long prosperity; and that your power of doing generous and charitable actions may be as extended as your will; which is by none more zealously desired than by your Grace’s most humble, most obliged, and most obedient servant,
                                                     JOHN DRYDEN.

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PREFACE.

It is with a poet as with a man who designs to build, and is very exact, as he supposes, in casting up the cost beforehand; but, generally speaking, he is mistaken in his account, and reckons short in the expense he first intended.  He alters his mind as the work proceeds, and will have this or that convenience more, of which he had not thought when he began.  So has it happened to me:  I have built a house, where I intended but a lodge; yet with better success than a certain nobleman, who, beginning with a dog-kennel, never lived to finish the palace he had contrived.

From translating the first of Homer’s Iliads (which I intended as an essay to the whole work) I proceeded to the translation of the twelfth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, because it contains, among other things, the causes, the beginning, and ending of the Trojan war.  Here I ought in reason to have stopped; but the speeches of Ajax and Ulysses lying next in my way, I could not baulk them.