Sir,
You will perhaps think it strange, that a person, obsequious enough to those he loves, should be able to hold out so long against the importunity of two such powerful solicitors, as my willingness to own a veneration for the Scripture, and my unwillingness to deny you any thing. But if you will give me leave to acquaint you with the considerations that have hitherto dissuaded me from the publication of the papers you press for, you will, I presume, rather marvel at my resolving at last to comply with your desires, than that I have been somewhat long contesting, before I could take up so opposed a resolution. First, then, the treatise of which the papers you desire make a part, was written nine or ten years ago, when my green youth made me very unripe for a task of that nature—whose difficulty requires, as well as its worth deserves, that it should be handled by a person in whom nature, education, and time have happily matched a senile maturity of judgment with a youthful vigour of fancy. Next, the discourse I have mentioned being written to a private friend, who put me upon that task, I not only had a theme of another’s choosing imposed upon me, for which he was pleased to think me much more fit than I had reason to think myself, but was, by the freedom allowable among friends, tempted to vent and express my thoughts with more negligence, than were proper to be made use of in a solemn discourse intended for public view: the contrary of which were yet very requisite for a person, who though he have, by I know not what unhappy fate, been cast upon the learning divers languages, has yet too great a concern for the knowledge of things to be a diligent or solicitous considerer of words; and so was more fit to write almost of any thing than of a style or of matters rhetorical. Besides, that my essay touching the Scripture having not been all written in one country, but partly in England, partly in another kingdom, and partly too on shipboard, it were strange if in what I writ there did not appear much of unevenness; and if it did not betray the unleisuredness and relish of the unsettledness of the wandering author, who, by thus rambling, was reduced, for want of a library, to comply with the request of his friend, who was more desirous to receive from the author apples and pears growing in his own orchard, than oranges and lemons fetched from foreign parts: whereby I was condemned not to enrich my discourse with what I might have borrowed of real and valuable from the eloquent composures of more happy pens. But these, Sir, are not all the determents that opposed my obeying you; for besides these disadvantages with which the discourse itself was written, that part of it you demand must appear with a peculiar, as well as great disadvantage; for in an entire and continued discourse the several parts that compose it do mutually afford light and confirmation to each other; and therefore, though whatsoever I here present you touching the style of the Scripture had been written altogether in some one place of the discourse, whereof it makes a part; yet I could not dismember it from the rest without a great deal of injury, as well to it as to the rest of the treatise. But this is not the worst of my case; for though I did in one part of my essay of the Scripture more professedly apply myself to the consideration of its style; yet because divers things were interwoven even in this distinct part, which were not so fit for public view; and because that in divers of the other parts of my essay, I had here and there, frequently enough, occasion to say something of the same theme, I have been obliged, that I might obey you, not only to dismember, but to mangle the treatise you perused, cutting out with a pair of scissars here a whole side, there half, and in another place, perhaps, a quarter of one, as I found in the other parts of my discourse, longer or shorter passages, that appeared to relate to the style of the Scripture, that I might give you at once all those parts of my essay which seemed to concern that subjecct. And though I have here and there, by dictating to an amanuensis, inserted some lines or words, to make the loose papers less incoherent, where I thought it easy to be done, yet in many others I have only prefixed a short black line, to the incoherent passages, if I found they could not be connected with those whereunto I have joined them, without such circumlocution as either the narrowness of the paper would not permit, or my present distractions (which you know are not a few) and the weakness of my eyes would not allow of. For to complete my unfitness to obey you with any thing of accurateness, I must, to obey you at all, do it both when I have other composures in the press, and when the distemper in my eyes makes me so far from daring to transcribe the papers I send you, that I might alter them according to the exigency of your design in them, that I durst not so much as read them over but with another’s eyes. To which I must add, that besides all these disadvantages I have already mentioned, I cannot but foretell that the following discourse may prove obnoxious to the censures of differing sorts of readers, and particularly to those of courtiers, for too neglected, and those of critics, for too spruce a dress. By all which I presume you will be easily induced to believe with me, that I cannot expose the papers you desire so much to their disadvantage and my own, without some exercise of self-denial: since without needing much foresight I may well apprehend, that I shall hereby hazard the loss of the most part of whatever little reputation in this nature any of my former moral or devout composures may among favourable readers have procured me.