For I cannot approve of their way of refining, who corrupt our English idiom by mixing it too much with French:  That is a sophistication of language not an improvement of it; a turning English into French, rather than a refining of English by French.  We meet daily with those fops, who value themselves on their travelling, and pretend they cannot express their meaning in English, because they would put off to us some French phrase of the last edition; without considering, that, for aught they know, we have a better of our own.  But these are not the men who are to refine us; their talent is to prescribe fashions, not words:  at best, they are only serviceable to a writer, so as Ennius was to Virgil.  He may aurum ex stercore colligere: For it is hard if, amongst many insignificant phrases, there happen not something worth preserving; though they themselves, like Indians, know not the value of their own commodity.

There is yet another way of improving language, which poets especially have practised in all ages; that is, by applying received words to a new signification; and this, I believe, is meant by Horace, in that precept which is so variously construed by expositors: 

  Dixeris egregie, notum si callida verbum
  Reddiderit junctura novum.

And, in this way, he himself had a particular happiness; using all the tropes, and particular metaphors, with that grace which is observable in his Odes, where the beauty of expression is often greater than that of thought; as, in that one example, amongst an infinite number of others, “Et vultus nimium lubricus aspici.”

And therefore, though he innovated a little, he may justly be called a great refiner of the Roman tongue.  This choice of words, and heightening of their natural signification, was observed in him by the writers of the following ages; for Petronius says of him, “Et Horatii curiosa felicitas.” By this graffing, as I may call it, on old words, has our tongue been beautified by the three before-mentioned poets, Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson, whose excellencies I can never enough admire; and in this they have been followed, especially by Sir John Suckling and Mr Waller, who refined upon them.  Neither have they, who succeeded them, been wanting in their endeavours to adorn our mother tongue:  But it is not so lawful for me to praise my living contemporaries, as to admire my dead predecessors.

I should now speak of the refinement of Wit; but I have been so large on the former subject, that I am forced to contract myself in this.  I will therefore only observe to you, that the wit of the last age was yet more incorrect than their language.  Shakespeare, who many times has written better than any poet, in any language, is yet so far from writing wit always, or expressing that wit according to the dignity of the subject, that he writes, in many places, below the dullest writers of ours, or any precedent age.