Whitehall, and in the town, the poets of this age would find so little
encouragement for their labours, and so few understanders, that they
might have leisure to turn pamphleteers, and augment the number of
those abominable scribblers, who, in this time of licence, abuse the
press, almost every day, with nonsense, and railing against the
government.

It remains, my lord, that I should give you some account of this
comedy, which you have never seen; because it was written and acted in
your absence, at your government of Jamaica. It was intended for an
honest satire against our crying sin of _keeping_; how it would have
succeeded, I can but guess, for it was permitted to be acted only
thrice. The crime, for which it suffered, was that which is objected
against the satires of Juvenal, and the epigrams of Catullus, that it
expressed too much of the vice which it decried. Your lordship knows
what answer was returned by the elder of those poets, whom I last
mentioned, to his accusers:

_--castum esse decet pium poetam
Ipsum. Versiculos nihil necesse est:
Qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem
Si sint molliculi et parum pudici._

But I dare not make that apology for myself; and therefore have taken
a becoming care, that those things which offended on the stage, might
be either altered, or omitted in the press; for their authority is,
and shall be, ever sacred to me, as much absent as present, and in all
alterations of their fortune, who for those reasons have stopped its
farther appearance on the theatre. And whatsoever hindrance it has
been to me in point of profit, many of my friends can bear me witness,