The Plague of Athens, which hapned in the second year of the Peloponnesian Warre · Thomas Sprat
=SIR=,
I Know not what pleasure you could take in bestowing your commands so unprofitably, unless it be that for which Nature sometimes cherishes and allows Monsters, The love of Variety. This onely delight you will receive by turning over this rude and unpolisht Copy, and comparing it with my excellent Patterns, the _Greek_ and _Latin_. By this you will see how much a noble Subject is chang’d and disfigured by an ill hand, and what reason _Alexander_ had to forbid his Picture to be drawn but by some celebrated Pencil. In _Greek Thucydides_ so well and so lively expresses it, that I know not which is more a Poem, his description, or that of _Lucretius_. Though it must be said, that the _Historian_ had a vast advantage over the _Poet_; He having been present on the place, and assaulted by the disease himself, had the horror familiar to his Eyes, and all the shapes of the _misery_ still remaining on his mind, which must needs make a great impression on his Pen and Fancie. Whereas the _Poet_ was forced to allow his foot-steps, and onely work on that matter he allow’d him.
This I speak, because it may in some measure too excuse my own defects: For being so far remov’d from the place whereon the disease acted its Tragedy; and time having denied us many of the circumstances, customes of the Countrey, and other small things which would be of great use to any one who did intend to be perfect on the subject; besides onely writing by an _Idea_ of that which I never yet saw, nor care to feel, (being not of the humor of the Painter in Sir _Philip Sidney_, who thrust himself into the midst of a Fight, that he might the better delineate it) having, I say, all these disadvantages, and many more, for which I must onely blame my self, it cannot be expected, that I should come near equalling him in whom none of the contrary advantages were wanting. Thus then, Sir, by emboldning me to this rash attempt, you have given opportunitie to the _Greek_ and _Latin_ to Triumph over our _Mother tongue_. Yet I would not have the honour of the Countries or Languages engaged in the comparison, but that the inequality should reach no farther than the Authors.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.