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THE following Translations were selected from many

others done by the Author in his Youth; for the most part indeed but a sort of Exercises, while he was improving himself in the Languages, and carried by his early bent to Poetry to perform them rather in Verse than Prose. Mr. Dryden's Fables came out about that time, which occasioned the Translations from Chaucer. They were first separately printed in Milcellanies by J. Tonson and B. Lintot, and afterwards collected in the Quarto Edition of 1717. The Imitations of English Authors, which follow, were done as early, some of them at fourteen or fifteen

years old.

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THE hint of the following piece was taken from

Chaucer's House of Fame. The design is in a manner entirely altered, the descriptions and most of the particular thoughts my own; yet I could not suffer it to be printed without this acknowledgment. The reader who would compare this with Chaucer, may begin with his third book of Fame, there being nothing in the two first books that answers to their title: wherever any hint is taken from him, the passage itself is set down in the marginal notes.

The Poem is introduced in the manner of the Provençal Poets, whose works were for the most part Vifions, or pieces of imagination, and constantly descriptive. From these, Petrarch and Chaucer frequently borrowed the idea of their poems. See the Trionfi of the former, and the Dream, Flower and the Leaf, &c. of the latter. The Author of this therefore chose the same sort of Exordium.

IN that foft season, when descending thowers

Call forth the greens, and wake the rising flowers ;
When opening buds salute the welcome day,
And earth relenting feels the genial ray;
As balmy sleep had charm'd my cares to reft,
And love itself was banish'd from my breast,
(What time the morn mysterious visions brings,
While

purer flumbers spread their golden wings)
A train of phantoms in wild order rose,
And, join'd, this intellectual scene compose.

I stood, methought, betwixt earth, feas, and skies ;
The whole creation open to my eyes :

In

IMITATION.
Ver. 11, &c.] These verses are hinted from the fol-
lowing of Chaucer, Book ii.

Though beheld I fields and plains,
Now hills, and now mountains,
Now valeis, and now forestes,
And now unneth great bestes,
Now rivers, now citees,
Now towns, now great trees,
Now shippes sayling in the fee.

20

In air self-balanc'd hung the globe below,
Where mountains rise, and circling oceans flow;
Here naked rocks, and empty wastes were seen 15
There towery cities, and the forests green:
Here failing ships delight the wandering eyes ;
There trees and intermingled temples rise;
Now a clear sun the shining scene displays,
The transient landscape now in clouds decays.

O’er the wide prospect as I gaz’d around,
Sudden I heard a wild promiscuous sound,
Like broken thunders that at distance roar,
Or billows murmuring on the hollow shore :
Then gazing up, a glorious pile beheld,

25 Whose towering summit ambient clouds conceal'd. High on a rock of Ice the structure lay, Steep its afcent, and Nippery was the way ; The wonderous rock like Parian marble shone, And seem'd, to distant fight, of solid stone. 30

Inscriptions
IMITATION.
Ver. 27. High on a rock of ice, &c.] Chaucer's third
book of Fame.

It stood upon so high a rock,
Higher standeth none in Spayne-
What manner stone this rock was,
For it was like a lymed glass,
But that it thone full more clere;
But of what congeled matere
It was, I niste redily;
But at the last espied I,
And found that it w.s every dele,
A rock of ice, and not of stele.