Hear, you bad writers, and though you not see, <br />I will inform you where you happy be: <br />Provide the most malicious thoughts you can, <br />And bend them all against some private man, <br />To bring him, not his vices, on the stage; <br />Your envy shall be clad in some poor rage, <br />And your expressing of him shall be such, <br />That he himself shall think he hath no touch. <br />Where he that strongly writes, although he mean <br />To scourge but vices in a laboured scene, <br />Yet private faults shall be so well express'd <br />As men do get 'em, that each private breast, <br />That finds these errors in itself, shall say, <br />'He meant me, not my vices, in the play.'<br /><br />Francis Beaumont<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/upon-the-silent-woman/
