Consecrated to Ben Jonson, Prince of Poets. O greatest of Poets! You, who have either suffered death, or a poetic ecstasy, are lain out in an awe-inspiring and more than human funeral. And so after the glory of sacred fury has been received, when the worn out Prophetess has ruined her now-exhausted divinity, and the Spirit, which will not return, has wasted itself by perpetual flux, the body of the Sibyl has lain open, even yet to be consulted as an oracle by anxious worshippers. GOD has indulged himself more largely with no-one, and has bidden no-one a more sorrowful farewell; while an Exile and while a Native, he invoked equal fires. Now with the evening of your years rushing on, God has left behind Your Breast, as it were the bounds of poetry, not without its own blushes: it is given to some poets to publish marvellous things, but not to understand them: a huge mystery to others, even greater to themselves, by the rite of wild poetic song, the poets vaunt of that pent-up divinity which they do not grasp, and they are wise by instinct not by intellect. For whom, so long as reckless bravery makes wit, it is beneficial to be ignorant: but to you it first befell to delight in your particular fury, and to govern your inspiration. Now you have joined Judgment with Inspiration in an equal wrestling match, in twofold turmoil: and you have added other Muses to the Muse, Arts and Sciences too, the Poet full of yourself. You are the one, who banishing the fury of madness, has taught that the Aonian waters be drunk soberly. You are the first one, who have castigated the unbridled luxury of Passion with sober Counsel, that Britain might possess, and the world might admire, a pleasing Wit without any indulgence, and find nothing to be given to your writings, except fame. But just because Prologues, like the Gateways of Magnates, display the titles of the Master, and the Author himself is celebrated as the endless argument, this is not an example of arrogance, but of Judgment and Poetic Foresight. For this belongs to courage and the poet too, to please himself. Therefore not only out of our envy, but for your deserved praise, the Fates have ordered You, great one, to come forth. You are the one who alone has exhibited the whole Poet to us, and one man representing everyone, when others pluck off the Laurel leaves, you demand the whole shady forest. Neither do you as a Sycophant offer praise, nor do you censure enviously, hating both: either mix honey, or the bitterness with medicine, with your sacrifice. Neither have you broken your oaten-pipe with too intense a spirit: Nor have you defiled your Trumpet with too weak a spirit; You have saved both with Laws, a self-made law. Together with the reverence of deference, you have met with Dominion: the servant of the State, not of the Times. Thus the Lover of all the Muses, you stand in the midst of a perpetual contest with all of them. Let it be the glory of Homer to have cities struggling about him, but it is the Muses who so dispute about you, you who either labours with the tragic buskin, the thundering Father among Poets, or fills the comic sock with a perfect foot, and composes Epigrams (which ought to be performed), and satires which ought to be wrought by your hands, you guide footsteps which are to be adored by posterity, and among us you are the one to lay out the Stage. Your drama has not exhibited the empty spectacles of the Arena, nor has it put forth little verses, but poetry itself. It has furnished reasons and laws for the people, by which they are able to judge you, if you were ever to err. Thus you supply eyes to the beholder, and shows to watch too; and you build a scene which might give more delight in being read than in being seen. Your own wit will not be blotted by an actor. These others i.e. actors, whose God is not Apollo, but Mercury, for whom wine and Love provide inspirations, thrust their faults into the Scene; this is the sickness of the Poet; those for whom the Muse is suited to the country and the first players' wagons, do not put forth a poem to the poet that will prematurely die, but instead abort it. He is one for whom the printing press itself is a tomb, and true Authors are, by the deception of Lucina Goddess of childbirth, sent into the shadows, while Poems, like Diaries, have depicted only their own time and place, and even so these modern witticisms are out of Plautus, though themselves only contemporaneous with Plautus: And certainly the native witticisims of Aristophanes have not found applause outside his own Theatre: You, meanwhile, breathe forth inspired genius of this age and of the future, and likewise the world is your theatre. Meanwhile an immense song is always springing up with the reader; without interruption you pour forth the Poem with our unanimous voice, and we give thanks to you for your happy pauses! Why have we nevertheless criticized these pauses, which your reverence for our people has made? What ought to be written for eternity ought to be read for eternity. You alone were able to restrain the world with your pen, greater than a sceptre. The sword of Rome subjugated the Britons, your pen has subjugated Rome to the Britons; a Rome desiring to be conquered, to be more sublime in the English tragic buskin than we have seen in their own hills. And at last, what is more important, you subjugate our own age to ourselves; a substitute for the Oracle, a Priest who shows off his faith, which God commanded, teaching Men to know themselves. Our tongue gathered from you and increased by you, you have formed your own words and native lands together. We boast no more of our native eloquence, but of the eloquence of Jonson, so that henceforward you might always be celebrated in your own Tongue; you who have taught more eloquent words to Rome, proud again in the foreign language of the servant. And you have cultivated Greece too, the Mistress of the World, now eloquent by other means than Attic Minerva. Rich in yourself alone, you were able to disregard the wit of others, and even without them you have left behind a surplus of wit. But like the very Painter, who will give an exact copy of an Idea to the world, this Maker has collected up beautiful things which Nature had spread out here and there: collecting the little wandering rivers of beautiful Forms into one Ocean, he bid another Venus without blemish to go forth from there. So by setting in motion the same device as yours, in this, too, Painting was like Poetry. Then other Authors add matter to your invention; you are Art to them, and you supplement them with Polish. So if poets listen to that, you are Poetry itself; not another pen of the author, but The Author. You are at last teaching those authors, who have been long troubled by yourself, that Spirit which a book that will survive ought to have. Those who had gone before, as many as there were, have been only Judges of the ways. You alone are the Pillar. The excellence, which is beneficial to others, stands in the way for the Master. And you who had copied others more accurately are yourself unable to be copied. He has struggled as an equal with his forebears, as an unequal with those yet to come, the Perpetual Dictator of the Scene.