Following on the footsteps of Horace's "Ars Poetica", Boileau's "Art of Poetry" lays down, in four books dealing with all forms and genres of poetry, the codes and rules for good versification. This beautiful translation, made even more precious by Dryden's polishing touch, proved to have a lasting influence on the future shape of English literature - among others, it was imitated magnificently by Pope in his "Essay on Criticism", who also took Lutrin as a model for his own masterpiece, "The Rape of the Lock". Now reprinted for the first time in more than a century, Sir William Soames' 1683 verse translation of Boileau's poetical masterpiece - revised by none other than John Dryden - here appears together with an eighteenth-century version of his hugely influential mock-heroic poem, "Lutrin", and with the original French text on facing pages.