greatest honour imaginable with posterity; that is, to be recorded in the number of those men whom you have favoured with your friendship and esteem.  For I am well assured, that, besides the present satisfaction I have, it will gain me the greatest part of my reputation with after ages, when they shall find me valuing myself on your kindness to me; I may have reason to suspect my own credit with them, but I have none to doubt of yours.  And they who, perhaps, would forget me in my poems, would remember me in this epistle.

This was the course which has formerly been practised by the poets of that nation, who were masters of the universe.  Horace and Ovid, who had little reason to distrust their immortality, yet took occasion to speak with honour of Virgil, Varius, Tibullus, and Propertius, their contemporaries; as if they sought, in the testimony of their friendship, a farther evidence of their fame.  For my own part, I, who am the least amongst the poets, have yet the fortune to be honoured with the best patron, and the best friend.  For, (to omit some great persons of our court, to whom I am many ways obliged, and who have taken care of me even amidst the exigencies of a war[3]) I can make my boast to have found a better Maecenas in the person of my Lord Treasurer Clifford[4], and a more elegant Tibullus in that of Sir Charles Sedley.  I have chosen that poet to whom I would resemble you, not only because I think him at least equal, if not superior, to Ovid in his elegies; nor because of his quality, for he was, you know, a Roman knight, as well as Ovid; but for his candour, his wealth, his way of living, and particularly because of this testimony which is given him by Horace, which I have a thousand times in my mind applied to you: 

Non tu corpus eras sine pectore:  Dii tibi formam, Dii tibi divitias dederant, artemque fruendi.  Quid voveat dulci nutricula majus alumno, Quam sapere, et fari possit quae sentiat, et cui Gratia, forma, valetudo contingat abunde; Et mundus victus, non deficiente crumena?

Certainly the poets of that age enjoyed much happiness in the conversation and friendship of one another.  They imitated the best way of living, which was, to pursue an innocent and inoffensive pleasure, that which one of the ancients called eruditam voluptatem.  We have, like them, our genial nights, where our discourse is neither too serious nor too light, but always pleasant, and, for the most part, instructive; the raillery, neither too sharp upon the present, nor too censorious on the absent; and the cups only such as will raise the conversation of the night, without disturbing the business of the morrow[5].  And thus far not only the philosophers, but the fathers of the church, have gone, without lessening their reputation of good manners, or of piety.  For this reason, I have often laughed at the ignorant and ridiculous descriptions which some pedants have given of the wits, as they