Excerpt from The Poetical Works of John Dryden: Edited With a Memoir, Revised Text, and Notes
This volume of Dryden"s Poems does not contain his Plays or Translations from Roman and Greek poets. It comprises all his Prologues and Epilogues to his own Plays, with his other Prologues and Epilogues, and also his free versions from Chaucer and Boccaccio, best known as his Fables. Three translations of Latin hymns are also included in the volume.
The Translation of Boileau"s "Art of Poetry," which is printed in Scott"s edition of Dryden"s works, is not included in this volume: for, though revised and altered by Dryden, the translation is in the main Sir Wilham Soame"s work. The "Essay on Satire" is also excluded from this collection, as being unquestionably the work of Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, afterwards successively Marquis of Normanby and Duke of Buckinghamshire. Some smaller pieces which preceding editors have printed among Dryden"s poems have been excluded: viz. the "Satire on the Dutch," said to have been written by Dryden in 1662, but in fact a bookseller"s concoction from his Prologue and Epilogue to "Amboyna" of 1673; the Prologue and Epilogue to "The Indian Queen," assigned without any authority to Dryden, and doubtless Sir Robert Howard"s, who wrote the play with some assistance from Dryden; and a second Epilogue to Lee"s "Mithridates," when acted in 1681, and the Epilogue to Southerne"s "Disappointment," which have both been mistakenly printed by Scott as Dryden"s.
It has been a principal object in this edition to correct and purify the text of Dryden"s poetry, which in the course of time has suffered from very many misprints and small changes by successive editors. Most, but not all, of the corrections made of preceding editors" texts are mentioned in the notes. The whole number of these small corrections is very considerable. The importance of corrections of this sort will not be judged by the smallness of the change for the worse introduced by carelessness or design. The word epocha, which appears in all modern editions in a line of "Astr?a Redux" (108),
"In story chasms, in epocha mistakes,"
and which has been cited by Archbishop Trench as a Dryden peculiarity, was not Dryden"s word.
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