their admiration into religion.  Moral perfections are raised higher by you in the softer sex; as if men were of too coarse a mould for heaven to work on, and that the image of divinity could not be cast to likeness in so harsh a metal.  Your person is so admirable, that it can scarce receive addition, when it shall be glorified:  and your soul, which shines through it, finds it of a substance so near her own, that she will be pleased to pass an age within it, and to be confined to such a palace.

I know not how I am hurried back to my former theme; I ought and purposed to have celebrated those endowments and qualities of your mind, which were sufficient, even without the graces of your person, to render you, as you are, the ornament of the court, and the object of wonder to three kingdoms.  But all my praises are but as a bull-rush cast upon a stream; if they sink not, ’tis because they are borne up by the strength of the current, which supports their lightness; but they are carried round again, and return on the eddy where they first began.  I can proceed no farther than your beauty; and even on that too I have said so little, considering the greatness of the subject, that, like him who would lodge a bowl upon a precipice, either my praise falls back, by the weakness of the delivery, or stays not on the top, but rolls over, and is lost on the other side.  I intended this a dedication; but how can I consider what belongs to myself, when I have been so long contemplating on you!  Be pleased then, madam, to receive this poem, without entitling so much excellency as yours, to the faults and imperfections of so mean a writer; and instead of being favourable to the piece, which merits nothing, forgive the presumption of the author; who is, with all possible veneration,

  Your Royal Highness’s
    Most obedient, most humble,
      Most devoted servant,
        JOHN DRYDEN.

Footnote: 
1.  Mary of Este, daughter of the Duke of Modena, and second wife to
   James Duke of York, afterwards James II.  She was married to him by
   proxy in 1673, and came over in the year following.  Notwithstanding
   her husband’s unpopularity, and her own attachment to the Roman
   Catholic religion, her youth, beauty, and innocence secured her
   from insult and slander during all the stormy period which preceded
   her accession to the crown.  Even Burnet, reluctantly, admits the
   force of her charms, and the inoffensiveness of her conduct.  But
   her beauty produced a more lasting effect on the young and gallant,
   than on that austere and stubborn partizan; and its force must be
   allowed, since it was extolled even when Mary was dethroned and
   exiled.  Granville, Lord Lansdowne, has praised her in “The Progress
   of Beauty;” and I cannot forbear transcribing some of the verses,
   on account of the gallant spirit of the author, who scorned to
   change with fortune, and continued to admire and celebrate, in
   adversity, the charms which he had worshipped in the meridian of
   prosperity.