Page:Annus Mirabilis - Dryden (1688).djvu/12

 strength. And as it is the happiness of the Age, so it is the peculiar goodness of the best of Kings, that we may praise his Subjects without offending him: Doubtless it proceeds from a just confidence of his own Virtue, which the lustre of no other can be so great as to darken in him; for the Good or the Valiant are never safely praised under a bad or a degenerate Prince. But to return from this digression to a farther account of my Poem, I must crave leave to tell you, that as I have endeavoured to adorn it with noble thoughts, so much more to express those thoughts with elocution. The Composition of all Poems is or ought to be of wit, and wit in the Poet, or wit writing, (if you will give me leave to use a School distinction,) is no other than the faculty of imagination in the Writer, which, like a nimble Spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of Memory, till it springs the Quarry it hunted after; or, without metaphor, which searches over all the Memory for the Species or Idea's of those things which it designs to represent. Wit written, is that which is well defin'd, the happy result of Thought, or product of Imagination. But to proceed from wit, in the general notion of it, to the proper wit of an Heroick or Historical Poem, I judge it chiefly to consist in the delightful imaging of Persons, Actions, Passions, or Things. 'Tis not the jerk or sting of an Epigram, nor the seeming contradiction of a poor Antithesis, (the delight of an ill-judging Audience in a Play of Rhyme,) nor the gingle of a more poor Paronomasia; neither is it so much the morality of a grave Sentence, affected by Lucan, but more sparingly used by Virgil; but it is some lively and apt description, dressed in such colours