TO THE MOST WORTHILY HONOURED,
MY SINGULAR GOOD LORD, ROBERT,
EARL OF SOMERSET,
LORD CHAMBERLAIN, ETC.
I have adventured, right noble Earl, out of my utmost and ever-vowed
service to your virtues, to entitle their merits to the patronage of
Homer’s English life, whose wished natural life the great Macedon would
have protected as the spirit of his empire,
That he to his unmeasur’d mighty acts
Might add a fame as vast; and their extracts,
In fires as bright and endless as the stars,
His breast might breathe and thunder out his wars.
But that great monarch’s love of fame and praise
Receives an envious cloud in our foul days;
For since our great ones ceased themselves to do,
Deeds worth their praise, they hold it folly too
To feed their praise in others. But what can,
Of all the gifts that are, be giv’n to man
More precious than Eternity and Glory,
Singing their praises in unsilenc’d story?
Which no black day, no nation, nor no age,
No change of time or fortune, force nor rage,
Shall ever rase? All which the monarch knew,
Where Homer liv’d entitled, would ensue:
_Cuius de gurgite vivo
Combibit arcanos vatum omnis turba furores, etc._
From whose deep fount of life the thirsty rout
Of Thespian prophets have lien sucking out
Their sacred rages. And as th’ influent stone
Of Father Jove’s great and laborious son
Lifts high the heavy iron, and far implies
The wide orbs that the needle rectifies,
In virtuous guide of ev’ry sea-driv’n course,
To all aspiring his one boundless force;
So from one Homer all the holy fire
That ever did the hidden heat inspire
In each true Muse came clearly sparkling down,
And must for him compose one flaming crown.
He, at Jove’s table set, fills out to us
Cups that repair age sad and ruinous,
And gives it built of an eternal stand
With his all-sinewy Odyssæan hand,
Shifts time and fate, puts death in life’s free state,
And life doth into ages propagate.
He doth in men the Gods’ affects inflame,
His fuel Virtue blown by Praise and Fame;
And, with the high soul’s first impression driv’n,
Breaks through rude chaos, earth, the seas, and heav’n.
The nerves of all things hid in nature lie
Naked before him; all their harmony
Tun’d to his accents, that in beasts breathe minds.
What fowls, what floods, what earth, what air, what winds,
What fires ethereal, what the Gods conclude
In all their counsels, his Muse makes indued
With varied voices that ev’n rocks have mov’d.
And yet for all this, naked Virtue lov’d,
Honours without her he as abject prizes,
And foolish Fame, deriv’d from thence, despises.
When from the vulgar taking glorious bound
Up to the mountain where the Muse is crown’d,
He sits and laughs to see the jaded rabble
Toil to his hard heights, t’ all access unable, etc.
And that your Lordship may in his face take view of his mind, the first
words of his Iliads is _μη̑νιν, wrath_; the first word of his Odysseys,
_ἄνδρα man:_ contracting in either word his each work’s proposition. In
one _predominant perturbation;_ in the other _over-ruling wisdom._ In
one the body’s fervour and fashion of outward fortitude to all possible
height of heroical action; in the other the mind’s inward, constant,
and unconquered empire, unbroken, unaltered, with any most insolent,
and tyrannous infliction. To many most sovereign praises is this poem
entitled; but to that grace, in chief, which sets on the crown both of
poets and orators; _τὸ τὰ μικρὰ μεγάλως, καὶ τὰ κοινὰ καιίνως:_
that is, _Parva magnè dicere; pervulgata novè; jejuna plenè.—To speak
things little greatly; things common rarely; things barren and empty
fruitfully and fully._ The return of a man into his country is his
whole scope and object; which in itself, your Lordship may well say, is
jejune and fruitless enough, affording nothing feastful, nothing
magnificent. And yet even this doth the divine inspiration render vast,
illustrious, and of miraculous composure. And for this, my Lord, is
this poem preferred to his lliads; for therein much magnificence, both
of person and action, gives great aid to his industry; but in this are
these helps exceeding sparing, or nothing; and yet is the structure so
elaborate and pompous that the poor plain ground-work, considered
together, may seem the naturally rich womb to it, and produce it
needfully. Much wondered at, therefore, is the censure of Dionysius
Longinus, (a man otherwise affirmed grave and of elegant judgment,)
comparing Homer in his Iliads to the Sun rising, in his Odysseys to his
descent or setting, or to the ocean robbed of his æsture, many
tributary floods and rivers of excellent ornament withheld from their
observance. When this his work so far exceeds the ocean, with all his
court and concourse, that all his sea is only a serviceable stream to
it. Nor can it be compared to any one power to be named in nature,
being an entirely well-sorted and digested confluence of all; where the
most solid and grave is made as nimble and fluent as the most airy and
fiery, the nimble and fluent as firm and well-bounded as the most grave
and solid. And, taking all together, of so tender impression, and of
such command to the voice of the Muse, that they knock heaven with her
breath, and discover their foundations as low as hell. Nor is this
all-comprising Poesy fantastic or mere fictive; but the most material
and doctrinal illations of truth, both for all manly information of
manners in the young, all prescription of justice, and even Christian
piety, in the most grave and high governed. To illustrate both which,
in both kinds, with all heightof expression, the Poet creates both a
body and a soul in them. Wherein, if the body (being the letter or
history) seems fictive, and beyond possibility to bring into act, the
sense then and allegory, which is the soul, is to be sought, which
intends a more eminent expressure of Virtue for her loveliness, and of
Vice for her ugliness, in their several effects; going beyond the life
than any art within life can possibly delineate. Why then is fiction to
this end so hateful to our true ignorants? Or why should a poor
chronicler of a Lord Mayor’s naked truth (that peradventure will last
his year) include more worth with our modern wizards than Homer for his
naked Ulysses clad in eternal fiction? But this proser Dionysius, and
the rest of these grave and reputatively learned—that dare undertake
for their gravities the headstrong censure of all things, and challenge
the understanding of these toys in their childhoods; when even these
childish vanities retain deep and most necessary learning enough in
them to make them children in their ages, and teach them while they
live—are not in these absolute divine infusions allowed either voice or
relish: for, _Qui Poeticas ad fores accedit, etc._ (says the divine
philosopher) he that knocks at the gates of the Muses, _sine Musarum
furore,_ is neither to be admitted entry, nor a touch at their
thresholds; his opinion of entry ridiculous, and his presumption
impious. Nor must Poets themselves (might I a little insist on these
contempts, not tempting too far your Lordship’s Ulyssean patience)
presume to these doors without the truly genuine and peculiar
induction. There being in Poesy a twofold rapture,—or alienation of
soul, as the abovesaid teacher terms it,—one _insania,_ a disease of
the mind, and a mere madness, by which the infected is thrust beneath
all the degrees of humanity: _et ex homine, brutum quodammodò
redditur:_—(for which poor Poesy, in this diseased and impostorous age,
is so barbarously vilified;)—the other is, _divinus furor,_ by which
the sound and divinely healthful _suprà hominis naturam erigitur, et in
Deum transit._ One a perfection directly infused from God; the other an
infection obliquely and degenerately proceeding from man. Of the divine
fury, my Lord, your Homer hath ever been both first and last instance;
being pronounced absolutely, _τὸν σοφώτατον, καὶ τὸν θειότατον
ποιητήν,_ “the most wise and most divine poet.” Against whom whosoever
shall open his profane mouth may worthily receive answer with this of
his divine defender—Empedocles, Heraclitus, Protagoras, Epicharmus,
etc., being of Homer’s part—_τίς οο͒ν,_ etc.; who against such an army,
and the general Homer, dares attempt the assault, but he must be
reputed ridiculous? And yet against this host, and this invincible
commander, shall we have every _besogne_ and fool a leader. The common
herd, I assure myself, ready to receive it on their horns. Their
infected leaders,
Such men as sideling ride the ambling Muse,
Whose saddle is as frequent as the stews.
Whose raptures are in ev’ry pageant seen,
In ev’ry wassail-rhyme and dancing-green;
When he that writes by any beam of truth
Must dive as deep as he, past shallow youth.
Truth dwells in gulfs, whose deeps hide shades so rich
That Night sits muffled there in clouds of pitch,
More dark than Nature made her, and requires,
To clear her tough mists, heav’n’s great fire of fires,
To whom the sun itself is but a beam.
For sick souls then—but rapt in foolish dream—
To wrastle with these heav’n-strong mysteries,
What madness is it? when their light serves eyes
That are not worldly in their least aspect,
But truly pure, and aim at heav’n direct.
Yet these none like but what the brazen head
Blatters abroad, no sooner born but dead.
Holding, then, in eternal contempt, my Lord, those short-lived bubbles,
eternize your virtue and judgment with the Grecian monarch; esteeming,
not as the least of your new-year’s presents,
Homer, three thousand years dead, now reviv’d,
Ev’n from that dull death that in life he liv’d;
When none conceited him, none understood
That so much life in so much death as blood
Conveys about it could mix. But when death
Drunk up the bloody mist that human breath
Pour’d round about him—poverty and spite.
Thick’ning the hapless vapour—then truth’s light
Glimmer’d about his poem; the pinch’d soul
(Amidst the mysteries it did enrol)
Brake pow’rfully abroad. And as we see
The sun all-hid in clouds, at length got free,
Through some forc’d covert, over all the ways,
Near and beneath him, shoots his vented rays
Far off, and sticks them in some little glade,
All woods, fields, rivers, left besides in shade;
So your Apollo, from that world of light
Clos’d in his poem’s body, shot to sight
Some few forc’d beams, which near him were not seen,
(As in his life or country) Fate and spleen
Clouding their radiance; which when Death had clear’d,
To far-off regions his free beams appear’d;
In which all stood and wonder’d, striving which
His birth and rapture should in right enrich.
Twelve labours of your Thespian Hercules
I now present your Lordship; do but please
To lend life means till th’ other twelve receive
Equal achievement; and let Death then reave
My life now lost in our patrician loves,
That knock heads with the herd; in whom there moves
One blood, one soul, both drown’d in one set height
Of stupid envy and mere popular spite.
Whose loves with no good did my least vein fill;
And from their hates I fear as little ill.
Their bounties nourish not when most they feed,
But, where there is no merit or no need,
Rain into rivers still, and are such show’rs
As bubbles spring and overflow the flow’rs.
Their worse parts and worst men their best suborns,
Like winter cows whose milk runs to their horns.
And as litigious clients’ books of law
Cost infinitely; taste of all the awe
Bench’d in our kingdom’s policy, piety, state;
Earn all their deep explorings; satiate
All sorts there thrust together by the heart
With thirst of wisdom spent on either part;
Horrid examples made of Life and Death
From their fine stuff wov’n; yet when once the breath
Of sentence leaves them, all their worth is drawn
As dry as dust, and wears like cobweb lawn:
So these men set a price upon their worth,
That no man gives but those that trot it forth
Though Need’s foul ways, feed Humours with all cost
Though Judgment sterves in them; rout, State engrost
(At all tobacco-benches, solemn tables,
Where all that cross their envies are their fables)
In their rank faction; shame and death approv’d
Fit penance for their opposites; none lov’d
But those that rub them; not a reason heard
That doth not soothe and glorify their preferr’d
Bitter opinions. When, would Truth resume
The cause to his hands, all would fly in fume
Before his sentence; since the innocent mind
Just God makes good, to Whom their worst is wind.
For, that I freely all my thoughts express,
My conscience is my thousand witnesses;
And to this stay my constant comforts vow,
_You for the world I have, or God for you._