an improvement by it.  Greatness was not then so easy of access, nor conversation so free, as now it is.  I cannot, therefore, conceive it any insolence to affirm, that, by the knowledge and pattern of their wit who writ before us, and by the advantage of our own conversation, the discourse and raillery of our comedies excel what has been written by them.  And this will be denied by none, but some few old fellows who value themselves on their acquaintance with the Black Friars; who, because they saw their plays, would pretend a right to judge ours.  The memory of these grave gentlemen is their only plea for being wits.  They can tell a story of Ben Jonson, and, perhaps, have had fancy enough to give a supper in the Apollo, that they might be called his sons[5]:  And, because they were drawn in to be laughed at in those times, they think themselves now sufficiently entitled to laugh at ours.  Learning I never saw in any of them; and wit no more than they could remember.  In short, they were unlucky to have been bred in an unpolished age, and more unlucky to live to a refined one.  They have lasted beyond their own, and are cast behind ours; and, not contented to have known little at the age of twenty, they boast of their ignorance at threescore.

Now, if they ask me, whence it is that our conversation is so much refined?  I must freely, and without flattery, ascribe it to the court; and, in it, particularly to the king, whose example gives a law to it.  His own misfortunes, and the nation’s, afforded him an opportunity, which is rarely allowed to sovereign princes, I mean of travelling, and being conversant in the most polished courts of Europe; and, thereby, of cultivating a spirit which was formed by nature to receive the impressions of a gallant and generous education.  At his return, he found a nation lost as much in barbarism as in rebellion:  And, as the excellency of his nature forgave the one, so the excellency of his manners reformed the other.  The desire of imitating so great a pattern first awakened the dull and heavy spirits of the English from their natural reservedness; loosened them from their stiff forms of conversation, and made them easy and pliant to each other in discourse.  Thus, insensibly, our way of living became more free; and the fire of the English wit, which was before stifled under a constrained, melancholy way of breeding, began first to display its force, by mixing the solidity of our nation with the air and gaiety of our neighbours[6].  This being granted to be true, it would be a wonder if the poets, whose work is imitation, should be the only persons in three kingdoms who should not receive advantage by it; or, if they should not more easily imitate the wit and conversation of the present age than of the past.