ANCIENT AND MODERN BY JOHN DRYDEN.

(1700)[A] 'Tis with a poet as with a man who designs to build, and is very exact, as he supposes, in casting up the cost beforehand, but, generally speaking, he is mistaken in his account, and reckons short of the expense he first intended.

He alters his mind as the work proceeds, and will have this or that convenience more, of which he had not thought when he began.

So has it happened to me; I have built a house, where I intended but a lodge; yet with better success than a certain nobleman,[1] who, beginning with a dog kennel, never liv'd to finish the palace he had contriv'd.
From translating the first of Homer's _Iliads_ (which I intended as an essay to the whole work) I proceeded to the translation of the twelfth book of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, because it contains, among other things, the causes, the beginning, and ending, of the Trojan war.
Here I ought in reason to have stopp'd; but the speeches of Ajax and Ulysses lying next in my way, I could not balk 'em.

When I had compass'd them, I was so taken with the former part of the fifteenth book, (which is the masterpiece of the whole _Metamorphoses_,) that I enjoin'd myself the pleasing task of rend'ring it into English.