No More Learning

But there must be a resemblance, which does not
depend upon their own will, between all the writers of any particular
age. They cannot escape from subjection to a common influence which
arises out of an infinite combination of circumstances belonging to
the times in which they live; though each is in a degree the author of
the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded. Thus, the
tragic poets of the age of Pericles; the Italian revivers of ancient
learning; those mighty intellects of our own country that succeeded
the Reformation, the translators of the Bible, Shakespeare, Spenser,
the Dramatists of the reign of Elizabeth, and Lord Bacon (Milton
stands alone in the age which he illumined. ); the colder spirits of
the interval that succeeded;--all resemble each other, and differ from
every other in their several classes. In this view of things, Ford can
no more be called the imitator of Shakespeare than Shakespeare the
imitator of Ford. There were perhaps few other points of resemblance
between these two men than that which the universal and inevitable
influence of their age produced. And this is an influence which
neither the meanest scribbler nor the sublimest genius of any era can
escape; and which I have not attempted to escape.

I have adopted the stanza of Spenser (a measure inexpressibly
beautiful), not because I consider it a finer model of poetical
harmony than the blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton, but because in
the latter there is no shelter for mediocrity; you must either succeed
or fail. This perhaps an aspiring spirit should desire. But I was
enticed also by the brilliancy and magnificence of sound which a mind
that has been nourished upon musical thoughts can produce by a just
and harmonious arrangement of the pauses of this measure. Yet there
will be found some instances where I have completely failed in this
attempt, and one, which I here request the reader to consider as an
erratum, where there is left, most inadvertently, an alexandrine in
the middle of a stanza.

But in this, as in every other respect, I have written fearlessly. It
is the misfortune of this age that its Writers, too thoughtless of
immortality, are exquisitely sensible to temporary praise or blame.
They write with the fear of Reviews before their eyes. This system of
criticism sprang up in that torpid interval when Poetry was not.
Poetry, and the art which professes to regulate and limit its powers,
cannot subsist together. Longinus could not have been the contemporary
of Homer, nor Boileau of Horace. Yet this species of criticism never
presumed to assert an understanding of its own; it has always, unlike
true science, followed, not preceded, the opinion of mankind, and
would even now bribe with worthless adulation some of our greatest
Poets to impose gratuitous fetters on their own imaginations, and
become unconscious accomplices in the daily murder of all genius
either not so aspiring or not so fortunate as their own. I have sought
therefore to write, as I believe that Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton
wrote, with an utter disregard of anonymous censure. I am certain that
calumny and misrepresentation, though it may move me to compassion,
cannot disturb my peace. I shall understand the expressive silence of
those sagacious enemies who dare not trust themselves to speak. I
shall endeavour to extract, from the midst of insult and contempt and
maledictions, those admonitions which may tend to correct whatever
imperfections such censurers may discover in this my first serious
appeal to the Public. If certain Critics were as clear-sighted as they
are malignant, how great would be the benefit to be derived from their
virulent writings! As it is, I fear I shall be malicious enough to be
amused with their paltry tricks and lame invectives. Should the Public
judge that my composition is worthless, I shall indeed bow before the
tribunal from which Milton received his crown of immortality, and
shall seek to gather, if I live, strength from that defeat, which may
nerve me to some new enterprise of thought which may not be worthless.
I cannot conceive that Lucretius, when he meditated that poem whose
doctrines are yet the basis of our metaphysical knowledge, and whose
eloquence has been the wonder of mankind, wrote in awe of such censure
as the hired sophists of the impure and superstitious noblemen of Rome
might affix to what he should produce. It was at the period when
Greece was led captive and Asia made tributary to the Republic, fast
verging itself to slavery and ruin, that a multitude of Syrian
captives, bigoted to the worship of their obscene Ashtaroth, and the
unworthy successors of Socrates and Zeno, found there a precarious
subsistence by administering, under the name of freedmen, to the vices
and vanities of the great. These wretched men were skilled to plead,
with a superficial but plausible set of sophisms, in favour of that
contempt for virtue which is the portion of slaves, and that faith in
portents, the most fatal substitute for benevolence in the
imaginations of men, which, arising from the enslaved communities of
the East, then first began to overwhelm the western nations in its
stream. Were these the kind of men whose disapprobation the wise and
lofty-minded Lucretius should have regarded with a salutary awe? The
latest and perhaps the meanest of those who follow in his footsteps
would disdain to hold life on such conditions.

The Poem now presented to the Public occupied little more than six
months in the composition.