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.  And now I found, by the number of my verses, that they began to swell into a little volume; which gave me an occasion of looking backward on some beauties of my author, in his former books.  There occurred to me the Hunting of the Boar, Cinyras and Myrrha, the good-natur’d story of Baucis and Philemon, with the rest, which I hope I have translated closely enough, and given them the same turn of verse which they had in the original; and this, I may say without vanity, is not the talent of every poet.  He who has arriv’d the nearest to it, is the ingenious and learned Sandys, the best versifier of the former age; if I may properly call it by that name, which was the former part of this concluding century.  For Spenser and Fairfax both flourish’d in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; great masters in our language, and who saw much farther into the beauties of our numbers than those who immediately followed them.  Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr. Waller of Fairfax, for we have our lineal descents and clans as well as other families.  Spenser more than once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfus’d into his body, and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease.  Milton has acknowledg’d to me that Spenser was his original, and many besides myself have heard our famous Waller own that he deriv’d the harmony of his numbers from the Godfrey of Bulloign, which was turned into English by Mr. Fairfax.  But to return.  Having done with Ovid for this time, it came into my mind that our old English poet, Chaucer, in many things resembled him, and that with no disadvantage on the side of the modern author, as I shall endeavor to prove when I compare them; and as I am, and always have been, studious to promote the honor of my native country, so I soon resolv’d to put their merits to the trial, by turning some of the Canterbury Tales into our language, as it is now refin’d; for by this means, both the poets being set in the same light, and dress’d in the same English habit, story to be compar’d with story, a certain judgment may be made betwixt them by the reader, without obtruding my opinion on him.  Or, if I seem partial to my countryman and predecessor in the laurel, the friends of antiquity are not few; and besides many of the learn’d, Ovid has almost all the beaux, and the whole fair sex, his declared patrons.  Perhaps