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+Project Gutenberg Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry, by Dryden
+#2 in our series by John Dryden
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+Title:  Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry
+
+Author:  John Dryden
+
+May, 2001  [Etext #2615]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry, by Dryden
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+This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+from the 1888 Cassell & Company edition.
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+
+
+DISCOURSES ON SATIRE AND ON EPIC POETRY
+
+by John Dryden
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+
+Dryden's discourses upon Satire and Epic Poetry belong to the latter
+years of his life, and represent maturer thought than is to be found
+in his "Essay of Dramatic Poesie."  That essay, published in 1667,
+draws its chief interest from the time when it was written.  A Dutch
+fleet was at the mouth of the Thames.  Dryden represents himself
+taking a boat down the river with three friends, one of them his
+brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard, another Sir Charles Sedley, and
+another Charles Sackville Lord Buckhurst to whom, as Earl of Dorset,
+the "Discourse of Satire" is inscribed.  They go down the river to
+hear the guns at sea, and judge by the sound whether the Dutch fleet
+be advancing or retreating.  On the way they talk of the plague of
+Odes that will follow an English victory; their talk of verse
+proceeds to plays, with particular attention to a question that had
+been specially argued before the public between Dryden and his
+brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard.  The question touched the use of
+blank verse in the drama.  Dryden had decided against it as a
+worthless measure, and the chief feature of the Essay, which was
+written in dialogue, was its support of Dryden's argument.  But in
+that year (1667) "Paradise Lost" was published, and Milton's blank
+verse was the death of Dryden's theories.  After a few years Dryden
+recanted his error.  The "Essay of Dramatic Poesie" is interesting
+as a setting forth in 1667 of mistaken critical opinions which were
+at that time in the ascendant, but had not very long to live.
+Dryden always wrote good masculine prose, and all his critical
+essays are good reading as pieces of English.  His "Essay of
+Dramatic Poesie" is good reading as illustrative of the weakness of
+our literature in the days of the influence of France after the
+Restoration.  The essays on Satire and on Epic Poetry represent also
+the influence of the French critical school, but represent it in a
+larger way, with indications of its strength as well as of its
+weakness.  They represent also Dryden himself with a riper mind
+covering a larger field of thought, and showing abundantly the
+strength and independence of his own critical judgment, while he
+cites familiarly and frequently the critics, little remembered and
+less cared for now, who then passed for the arbiters of taste.
+
+If English literature were really taught in schools, and the eldest
+boys had received training that brought them in their last school-
+year to a knowledge of the changes of intellectual fashion that set
+their outward mark upon successive periods, there is no prose
+writing of Dryden that could be used by a teacher more instructively
+than these Discourses on Satire and on Epic Poetry.  They illustrate
+abundantly both Dryden and his time, and give continuous occasion
+for discussion of first principles, whether in disagreement or
+agreement with the text.  Dryden was on his own ground as a critic
+of satire; and the ideal of an epic that the times, and perhaps also
+the different bent of his own genius, would not allow him to work
+out, at least finds such expression as might be expected from a man
+who had high aspirations, and whose place, in times unfavourable to
+his highest aims, was still among the master-poets of the world.
+
+The Discourse on Satire was prefixed to a translation of the satires
+of Juvenal and Persius, and is dated the 18th of August, 1692, when
+the poet's age was sixty-one.  In translating Juvenal, Dryden was
+helped by his sons Charles and John.  William Congreve translated
+one satire; other translations were by Nahum Tate and George
+Stepney.  Time modern reader of the introductory discourse has first
+to pass through the unmeasured compliments to the Earl of Dorset,
+which represent a real esteem and gratitude in the extravagant terms
+then proper to the art of dedication.  We get to the free sea over a
+slimy shore.  We must remember that Charles the Second upon his
+death was praised by Charles Montague, who knew his faults, as "the
+best good man that ever filled a throne," and compared to God
+Himself at the end of the first paragraph of Montague's poem.  But
+when we are clear of the conventional unmeasured flatteries, and
+Dryden lingers among epic poets on his way to the satirists, there
+is equal interest in the mistaken criticisms, in the aspirations
+that are blended with them, and in the occasional touches of the
+poet's personality in quiet references to his critics.  The
+comparisons between Horace and Juvenal in this discourse, and much
+of the criticism on Virgil in the discourse on epic poetry, are the
+utterances of a poet upon poets, and full of right suggestions from
+an artist's mind.  The second discourse was prefixed in 1697--three
+years before Dryden's death--to his translation of the AEneid.
+
+H. M.
+
+
+
+A DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGINAL AND PROGRESS OF SATIRE:
+ADDRESSED TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
+CHARLES, EARL OF DORSET AND MIDDLESEX,
+LORD CHAMBERLAIN OF HIS MAJESTY'S HOUSEHOLD, KNIGHT OF THE MOST
+NOBLE ORDER OF THE GARTER, ETC.
+
+
+
+My Lord,
+
+The wishes and desires of all good men, which have attended your
+lordship from your first appearance in the world, are at length
+accomplished, from your obtaining those honours and dignities which
+you have so long deserved.  There are no factions, though
+irreconcilable to one another, that are not united in their
+affection to you, and the respect they pay you.  They are equally
+pleased in your prosperity, and would be equally concerned in your
+afflictions.  Titus Vespasian was not more the delight of human
+kind.  The universal empire made him only more known and more
+powerful, but could not make him more beloved.  He had greater
+ability of doing good, but your inclination to it is not less:  and
+though you could not extend your beneficence to so many persons, yet
+you have lost as few days as that excellent emperor; and never had
+his complaint to make when you went to bed, that the sun had shone
+upon you in vain, when you had the opportunity of relieving some
+unhappy man.  This, my lord, has justly acquired you as many friends
+as there are persons who have the honour to be known to you.  Mere
+acquaintance you have none; you have drawn them all into a nearer
+line; and they who have conversed with you are for ever after
+inviolably yours.  This is a truth so generally acknowledged that it
+needs no proof:  it is of the nature of a first principle, which is
+received as soon as it is proposed; and needs not the reformation
+which Descartes used to his; for we doubt not, neither can we
+properly say, we think we admire and love you above all other men:
+there is a certainty in the proposition, and we know it.  With the
+same assurance I can say, you neither have enemies, nor can scarce
+have any; for they who have never heard of you can neither love or
+hate you; and they who have, can have no other notion of you than
+that which they receive from the public, that you are the best of
+men.  After this, my testimony can be of no farther use, than to
+declare it to be daylight at high noon:  and all who have the
+benefit of sight can look up as well and see the sun.
+
+It is true, I have one privilege which is almost particular to
+myself, that I saw you in the east at your first arising above the
+hemisphere:  I was as soon sensible as any man of that light when it
+was but just shooting out and beginning to travel upwards to the
+meridian.  I made my early addresses to your lordship in my "Essay
+of Dramatic Poetry," and therein bespoke you to the world; wherein I
+have the right of a first discoverer.  When I was myself in the
+rudiments of my poetry, without name or reputation in the world,
+having rather the ambition of a writer than the skill; when I was
+drawing the outlines of an art, without any living master to
+instruct me in it--an art which had been better praised than studied
+here in England; wherein Shakespeare, who created the stage among
+us, had rather written happily than knowingly and justly; and
+Jonson, who, by studying Horace, had been acquainted with the rules,
+yet seemed to envy to posterity that knowledge, and, like an
+inventor of some useful art, to make a monopoly of his learning--
+when thus, as I may say, before the use of the loadstone or
+knowledge of the compass, I was sailing in a vast ocean without
+other help than the pole-star of the ancients and the rules of the
+French stage amongst the moderns (which are extremely different from
+ours, by reason of their opposite taste), yet even then I had the
+presumption to dedicate to your lordship--a very unfinished piece, I
+must confess, and which only can be excused by the little experience
+of the author and the modesty of the title--"An Essay."  Yet I was
+stronger in prophecy than I was in criticism:  I was inspired to
+foretell you to mankind as the restorer of poetry, the greatest
+genius, the truest judge, and the best patron.
+
+Good sense and good nature are never separated, though the ignorant
+world has thought otherwise.  Good nature, by which I mean
+beneficence and candour, is the product of right reason; which of
+necessity will give allowance to the failings of others by
+considering that there is nothing perfect in mankind; and by
+distinguishing that which comes nearest to excellency, though not
+absolutely free from faults, will certainly produce a candour in the
+judge.  It is incident to an elevated understanding like your
+lordship's to find out the errors of other men; but it is your
+prerogative to pardon them; to look with pleasure on those things
+which are somewhat congenial and of a remote kindred to your own
+conceptions; and to forgive the many failings of those who, with
+their wretched art, cannot arrive to those heights that you possess
+from a happy, abundant, and native genius which are as inborn to you
+as they were to Shakespeare, and, for aught I know, to Homer; in
+either of whom we find all arts and sciences, all moral and natural
+philosophy, without knowing that they ever studied them.
+
+There is not an English writer this day living who is not perfectly
+convinced that your lordship excels all others in all the several
+parts of poetry which you have undertaken to adorn.  The most vain
+and the most ambitions of our age have not dared to assume so much
+as the competitors of Themistocles:  they have yielded the first
+place without dispute; and have been arrogantly content to be
+esteemed as second to your lordship, and even that also with a
+longo, sed proximi intervallo.  If there have been, or are, any who
+go farther in their self-conceit, they must be very singular in
+their opinion; they must be like the officer in a play who was
+called captain, lieutenant, and company.  The world will easily
+conclude whether such unattended generals can ever be capable of
+making a revolution in Parnassus.
+
+I will not attempt in this place to say anything particular of your
+lyric poems, though they are the delight and wonder of the age, and
+will be the envy of the next.  The subject of this book confines me
+to satire; and in that an author of your own quality, whose ashes I
+will not disturb, has given you all the commendation which his self-
+sufficiency could afford to any man--"The best good man, with the
+worst-natured muse."  In that character, methinks, I am reading
+Jonson's verses to the memory of Shakespeare; an insolent, sparing,
+and invidious panegyric:  where good nature--the most godlike
+commendation of a man--is only attributed to your person, and denied
+to your writings; for they are everywhere so full of candour, that,
+like Horace, you only expose the follies of men without arraigning
+their vices; and in this excel him, that you add that pointedness of
+thought which is visibly wanting in our great Roman.  There is more
+of salt in all your verses than I have seen in any of the moderns,
+or even of the ancients:  but you have been sparing of the gall; by
+which means you have pleased all readers and offended none.  Donne
+alone, of all our countrymen, had your talent, but was not happy
+enough to arrive at your versification; and were he translated into
+numbers and English, he would yet be wanting in the dignity of
+expression.  That which is the prime virtue and chief ornament of
+Virgil, which distinguishes him from the rest of writers, is so
+conspicuous in your verses that it casts a shadow on all your
+contemporaries; we cannot be seen, or but obscurely, while you are
+present.  You equal Donne in the variety, multiplicity, and choice
+of thoughts; you excel him in the manner and the words.  I read you
+both with the same admiration, but not with the same delight.  He
+affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous
+verses, where Nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of
+the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should
+engage their hearts and entertain them with the softnesses of love.
+In this (if I may be pardoned for so bold a truth) Mr. Cowley has
+copied him to a fault:  so great a one, in my opinion, that it
+throws his "Mistress" infinitely below his "Pindarics" and his later
+compositions, which are undoubtedly the best of his poems and the
+most correct.  For my own part I must avow it freely to the world
+that I never attempted anything in satire wherein I have not studied
+your writings as the most perfect model.  I have continually laid
+them before me; and the greatest commendation which my own
+partiality can give to my productions is that they are copies, and
+no farther to be allowed than as they have something more or less of
+the original.  Some few touches of your lordship, some secret graces
+which I have endeavoured to express after your manner, have made
+whole poems of mine to pass with approbation:  but take your verses
+all together, and they are inimitable.  If, therefore, I have not
+written better, it is because you have not written more.  You have
+not set me sufficient copy to transcribe; and I cannot add one
+letter of my own invention of which I have not the example there.
+
+It is a general complaint against your lordship, and I must have
+leave to upbraid you with it, that, because you need not write, you
+will not.  Mankind that wishes you so well in all things that relate
+to your prosperity, have their intervals of wishing for themselves,
+and are within a little of grudging you the fulness of your fortune:
+they would be more malicious if you used it not so well and with so
+much generosity.
+
+Fame is in itself a real good, if we may believe Cicero, who was
+perhaps too fond of it; but even fame, as Virgil tells us, acquires
+strength by going forward.  Let Epicurus give indolency as an
+attribute to his gods, and place in it the happiness of the blest:
+the Divinity which we worship has given us not only a precept
+against it, but His own example to the contrary.  The world, my
+lord, would be content to allow you a seventh day for rest; or, if
+you thought that hard upon you, we would not refuse you half your
+time:  if you came out, like some great monarch, to take a town but
+once a year, as it were for your diversion, though you had no need
+to extend your territories.  In short, if you were a bad, or, which
+is worse, an indifferent poet, we would thank you for our own quiet,
+and not expose you to the want of yours.  But when you are so great,
+and so successful, and when we have that necessity of your writing
+that we cannot subsist entirely without it, any more (I may almost
+say) than the world without the daily course of ordinary Providence,
+methinks this argument might prevail with you, my lord, to forego a
+little of your repose for the public benefit.  It is not that you
+are under any force of working daily miracles to prove your being,
+but now and then somewhat of extraordinary--that is, anything of
+your production--is requisite to refresh your character.
+
+This, I think, my lord, is a sufficient reproach to you, and should
+I carry it as far as mankind would authorise me, would be little
+less than satire.  And indeed a provocation is almost necessary, in
+behalf of the world, that you might be induced sometimes to write;
+and in relation to a multitude of scribblers, who daily pester the
+world with their insufferable stuff, that they might be discouraged
+from writing any more.  I complain not of their lampoons and libels,
+though I have been the public mark for many years.  I am vindictive
+enough to have repelled force by force if I could imagine that any
+of them had ever reached me:  but they either shot at rovers, and
+therefore missed; or their powder was so weak that I might safely
+stand them at the nearest distance.  I answered not the "Rehearsal"
+because I knew the author sat to himself when he drew the picture,
+and was the very Bayes of his own farce; because also I knew that my
+betters were more concerned than I was in that satire; and, lastly,
+because Mr. Smith and Mr. Johnson, the main pillars of it, were two
+such languishing gentlemen in their conversation that I could liken
+them to nothing but to their own relations, those noble characters
+of men of wit and pleasure about the town.  The like considerations
+have hindered me from dealing with the lamentable companions of
+their prose and doggerel.  I am so far from defending my poetry
+against them that I will not so much as expose theirs.  And for my
+morals, if they are not proof against their attacks, let me be
+thought by posterity what those authors would be thought if any
+memory of them or of their writings could endure so long as to
+another age.  But these dull makers of lampoons, as harmless as they
+have been to me, are yet of dangerous example to the public.  Some
+witty men may perhaps succeed to their designs, and, mixing sense
+with malice, blast the reputation of the most innocent amongst men,
+and the most virtuous amongst women.
+
+Heaven be praised, our common libellers are as free from the
+imputation of wit as of morality, and therefore whatever mischief
+they have designed they have performed but little of it.  Yet these
+ill writers, in all justice, ought themselves to be exposed, as
+Persius has given us a fair example in his first Satire, which is
+levelled particularly at them; and none is so fit to correct their
+faults as he who is not only clear from any in his own writings, but
+is also so just that he will never defame the good, and is armed
+with the power of verse to punish and make examples of the bad.  But
+of this I shall have occasion to speak further when I come to give
+the definition and character of true satires.
+
+In the meantime, as a counsellor bred up in the knowledge of the
+municipal and statute laws may honestly inform a just prince how far
+his prerogative extends, so I may be allowed to tell your lordship,
+who by an undisputed title are the king of poets, what an extent of
+power you have, and how lawfully you may exercise it over the
+petulant scribblers of this age.  As Lord Chamberlain, I know, you
+are absolute by your office in all that belongs to the decency and
+good manners of the stage.  You can banish from thence scurrility
+and profaneness, and restrain the licentious insolence of poets and
+their actors in all things that shock the public quiet, or the
+reputation of private persons, under the notion of humour.  But I
+mean not the authority which is annexed to your office, I speak of
+that only which is inborn and inherent to your person; what is
+produced in you by an excellent wit, a masterly and commanding
+genius over all writers:  whereby you are empowered, when you
+please, to give the final decision of wit, to put your stamp on all
+that ought to pass for current and set a brand of reprobation on
+clipped poetry and false coin.  A shilling dipped in the bath may go
+for gold amongst the ignorant, but the sceptres on the guineas show
+the difference.  That your lordship is formed by nature for this
+supremacy I could easily prove (were it not already granted by the
+world) from the distinguishing character of your writing, which is
+so visible to me that I never could be imposed on to receive for
+yours what was written by any others, or to mistake your genuine
+poetry for their spurious productions.  I can farther add with
+truth, though not without some vanity in saying it, that in the same
+paper written by divers hands, whereof your lordship's was only
+part, I could separate your gold from their copper; and though I
+could not give back to every author his own brass (for there is not
+the same rule for distinguishing betwixt bad and bad as betwixt ill
+and excellently good), yet I never failed of knowing what was yours
+and what was not, and was absolutely certain that this or the other
+part was positively yours, and could not possibly be written by any
+other.
+
+True it is that some bad poems, though not all, carry their owners'
+marks about them.  There is some peculiar awkwardness, false
+grammar, imperfect sense, or, at the least, obscurity; some brand or
+other on this buttock or that ear that it is notorious who are the
+owners of the cattle, though they should not sign it with their
+names.  But your lordship, on the contrary, is distinguished not
+only by the excellency of your thoughts, but by your style and
+manner of expressing them.  A painter judging of some admirable
+piece may affirm with certainty that it was of Holbein or Vandyck;
+but vulgar designs and common draughts are easily mistaken and
+misapplied.  Thus, by my long study of your lordship, I am arrived
+at the knowledge of your particular manner.  In the good poems of
+other men, like those artists, I can only say, "This is like the
+draught of such a one, or like the colouring of another;" in short,
+I can only be sure that it is the hand of a good master:  but in
+your performances it is scarcely possible for me to be deceived.  If
+you write in your strength, you stand revealed at the first view,
+and should you write under it, you cannot avoid some peculiar graces
+which only cost me a second consideration to discover you:  for I
+may say it with all the severity of truth, that every line of yours
+is precious.  Your lordship's only fault is that you have not
+written more, unless I could add another, and that yet greater, but
+I fear for the public the accusation would not be true--that you
+have written, and out of a vicious modesty will not publish.
+
+Virgil has confined his works within the compass of eighteen
+thousand lines, and has not treated many subjects, yet he ever had,
+and ever will have, the reputation of the best poet.  Martial says
+of him that he could have excelled Varius in tragedy and Horace in
+lyric poetry, but out of deference to his friends he attempted
+neither.
+
+The same prevalence of genius is in your lordship, but the world
+cannot pardon your concealing it on the same consideration, because
+we have neither a living Varius nor a Horace, in whose excellences
+both of poems, odes, and satires, you had equalled them, if our
+language had not yielded to the Roman majesty, and length of time
+had not added a reverence to the works of Horace.  For good sense is
+the same in all or most ages, and course of time rather improves
+nature than impairs her.  What has been, may be again; another Homer
+and another Virgil may possible arise from those very causes which
+produced the first, though it would be impudence to affirm that any
+such have yet appeared.
+
+It is manifest that some particular ages have been more happy than
+others in the production of great men in all sorts of arts and
+sciences, as that of Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and the
+rest, for stage-poetry amongst the Greeks; that of Augustus for
+heroic, lyric, dramatic, elegiac, and indeed all sorts of poetry in
+the persons of Virgil, Horace, Varius, Ovid, and many others,
+especially if we take into that century the latter end of the
+commonwealth, wherein we find Varro, Lucretius, and Catullus; and at
+the same time lived Cicero and Sallust and Caesar.  A famous age in
+modern times for learning in every kind was that of Lorenzo de
+Medici and his son Leo the Tenth, wherein painting was revived, and
+poetry flourished, and the Greek language was restored.
+
+Examples in all these are obvious, but what I would infer is this--
+that in such an age it is possible some great genius may arise to
+equal any of the ancients, abating only for the language; for great
+contemporaries whet and cultivate each other, and mutual borrowing
+and commerce makes the common riches of learning, as it does of the
+civil government.
+
+But suppose that Homer and Virgil were the only of their species,
+and that nature was so much worn out in producing them that she is
+never able to hear the like again, yet the example only holds in
+heroic poetry; in tragedy and satire I offer myself to maintain,
+against some of our modern critics, that this age and the last,
+particularly in England, have excelled the ancients in both those
+kinds, and I would instance in Shakespeare of the former, of your
+lordship in the latter sort.
+
+Thus I might safely confine myself to my native country.  But if I
+would only cross the seas, I might find in France a living Horace
+and a Juvenal in the person of the admirable Boileau, whose numbers
+are excellent, whose expressions are noble, whose thoughts are just,
+whose language is pure, whose satire is pointed and whose sense is
+close.  What he borrows from the ancients, he repays with usury of
+his own in coin as good and almost as universally valuable:  for,
+setting prejudice and partiality apart, though he is our enemy, the
+stamp of a Louis, the patron of all arts, is not much inferior to
+the medal of an Augustus Caesar.  Let this be said without entering
+into the interests of factions and parties, and relating only to the
+bounty of that king to men of learning and merit--a praise so just
+that even we, who are his enemies, cannot refuse it to him.
+
+Now if it may be permitted me to go back again to the consideration
+of epic poetry, I have confessed that no man hitherto has reached or
+so much as approached to the excellences of Homer or of Virgil; I
+must farther add that Statius, the best versificator next to Virgil,
+knew not how to design after him, though he had the model in his
+eye; that Lucan is wanting both in design and subject, and is
+besides too full of heat and affectation; that amongst the moderns,
+Ariosto neither designed justly nor observed any unity of action, or
+compass of time, or moderation in the vastness of his draught:  his
+style is luxurious without majesty or decency, and his adventures
+without the compass of nature and possibility.  Tasso, whose design
+was regular, and who observed the roles of unity in time and place
+more closely than Virgil, yet was not so happy in his action:  he
+confesses himself to have been too lyrical--that is, to have written
+beneath the dignity of heroic verse--in his episodes of Sophronia,
+Erminia, and Armida.  His story is not so pleasing as Ariosto's; he
+is too flatulent sometimes, and sometimes too dry; many times
+unequal, and almost always forced; and, besides, is full of
+conceits, points of epigram, and witticisms; all which are not only
+below the dignity of heroic verse, but contrary to its nature:
+Virgil and Homer have not one of them.  And those who are guilty of
+so boyish an ambition in so grave a subject are so far from being
+considered as heroic poets that they ought to be turned down from
+Homer to the "Anthologia," from Virgil to Martial and Owen's
+Epigrams, and from Spenser to Flecknoe--that is, from the top to the
+bottom of all poetry.  But to return to Tasso:  he borrows from the
+invention of Boiardo, and in his alteration of his poem, which is
+infinitely for the worse, imitates Homer so very servilely that (for
+example) he gives the King of Jerusalem fifty sons, only because
+Homer had bestowed the like number on King Priam; he kills the
+youngest in the same manner; and has provided his hero with a
+Patroclus, under another name, only to bring him back to the wars
+when his friend was killed.  The French have performed nothing in
+this kind which is not far below those two Italians, and subject to
+a thousand more reflections, without examining their "St. Louis,"
+their "Pucelle," or their "Alaric."  The English have only to boast
+of Spenser and Milton, who neither of them wanted either genius or
+learning to have been perfect poets; and yet both of them are liable
+to many censures.  For there is no uniformity in the design of
+Spenser; he aims at the accomplishment of no one action; he raises
+up a hero for every one of his adventures, and endows each of them
+with some particular moral virtue, which renders them all equal,
+without subordination or preference:  every one is most valiant in
+his own legend:  only we must do him that justice to observe that
+magnanimity, which is the character of Prince Arthur, shines
+throughout the whole poem, and succours the rest when they are in
+distress.  The original of every knight was then living in the court
+of Queen Elizabeth, and he attributed to each of them that virtue
+which he thought was most conspicuous in them--an ingenious piece of
+flattery, though it turned not much to his account.  Had he lived to
+finish his poem in the six remaining legends, it had certainly been
+more of a piece; but could not have been perfect, because the model
+was not true.  But Prince Arthur, or his chief patron Sir Philip
+Sidney, whom he intended to make happy by the marriage of his
+Gloriana, dying before him, deprived the poet both of means and
+spirit to accomplish his design.  For the rest, his obsolete
+language and the ill choice of his stanza are faults but of the
+second magnitude; for, notwithstanding the first, he is still
+intelligible--at least, after a little practice; and for the last,
+he is the more to be admired that, labouring under such a
+difficulty, his verses are so numerous, so various and so
+harmonious, that only Virgil, whom he professedly imitated, has
+surpassed him among the Romans, and only Mr. Waller among the
+English.
+
+As for Mr. Milton, whom we all admire with so much justice, his
+subject is not that of an heroic poem, properly so called.  His
+design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous,
+like that of all other epic works; his heavenly machines are many,
+and his human persons are but two.  But I will not take Mr. Rymer's
+work out of his hands:  he has promised the world a critique on that
+author wherein, though he will not allow his poem for heroic, I hope
+he will grant us that his thoughts are elevated, his words sounding,
+and that no man has so happily copied the manner of Homer, or so
+copiously translated his Grecisms and the Latin elegances of Virgil.
+It is true, he runs into a flat of thought, sometimes for a hundred
+lines together, but it is when he has got into a track of Scripture.
+His antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity; for therein
+he imitated Spenser, as Spencer did Chaucer.  And though, perhaps,
+the love of their masters may have transported both too far in the
+frequent use of them, yet in my opinion obsolete words may then be
+laudably revived when either they are more sounding or more
+significant than those in practice, and when their obscurity is
+taken away by joining other words to them which clear the sense--
+according to the rule of Horace for the admission of new words.  But
+in both cases a moderation is to be observed in the use of them; for
+unnecessary coinage, as well as unnecessary revival, runs into
+affectation--a fault to be avoided on either hand.  Neither will I
+justify Milton for his blank verse, though I may excuse him by the
+example of Hannibal Caro and other Italians who have used it; for,
+whatever causes he alleges for the abolishing of rhyme (which I have
+not now the leisure to examine), his own particular reason is
+plainly this--that rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease
+of doing it, nor the graces of it:  which is manifest in his
+"Juvenilia" or verses written in his youth, where his rhyme is
+always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age
+when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost
+every man a rhymer, though not a poet.
+
+By this time, my lord, I doubt not but that you wonder why I have
+run off from my bias so long together, and made so tedious a
+digression from satire to heroic poetry; but if you will not excuse
+it by the tattling quality of age (which, as Sir William Davenant
+says, is always narrative), yet I hope the usefulness of what I have
+to say on this subject will qualify the remoteness of it; and this
+is the last time I will commit the crime of prefaces, or trouble the
+world with my notions of anything that relates to verse.  I have
+then, as you see, observed the failings of many great wits amongst
+the moderns who have attempted to write an epic poem.  Besides
+these, or the like animadversions of them by other men, there is yet
+a farther reason given why they cannot possibly succeed so well as
+the ancients, even though we could allow them not to be inferior
+either in genius or learning, or the tongue in which they write, or
+all those other wonderful qualifications which are necessary to the
+forming of a true accomplished heroic poet.  The fault is laid on
+our religion; they say that Christianity is not capable of those
+embellishments which are afforded in the belief of those ancient
+heathens.
+
+And it is true that in the severe notions of our faith the fortitude
+of a Christian consists in patience, and suffering for the love of
+God whatever hardships can befall in the world--not in any great
+attempt, or in performance of those enterprises which the poets call
+heroic, and which are commonly the effects of interest, ostentation,
+pride, and worldly honour; that humility and resignation are our
+prime virtues; and that these include no action but that of the
+soul, whereas, on the contrary, an heroic poem requires to its
+necessary design, and as its last perfection, some great action of
+war, the accomplishment of some extraordinary undertaking, which
+requires the strength and vigour of the body, the duty of a soldier,
+the capacity and prudence of a general, and, in short, as much or
+more of the active virtue than the suffering.  But to this the
+answer is very obvious.  God has placed us in our several stations;
+the virtues of a private Christian are patience, obedience,
+submission, and the like; but those of a magistrate or a general or
+a king are prudence, counsel, active fortitude, coercive power,
+awful command, and the exercise of magnanimity as well as justice.
+So that this objection hinders not but that an epic poem, or the
+heroic action of some great commander, enterprised for the common
+good and honour of the Christian cause, and executed happily, may be
+as well written now as it was of old by the heathens, provided the
+poet be endued with the same talents; and the language, though not
+of equal dignity, yet as near approaching to it as our modern
+barbarism will allow--which is all that can be expected from our own
+or any other now extant, though more refined; and therefore we are
+to rest contented with that only inferiority, which is not possibly
+to be remedied.
+
+I wish I could as easily remove that other difficulty which yet
+remains.  It is objected by a great French critic as well as an
+admirable poet, yet living, and whom I have mentioned with that
+honour which his merit exacts from me (I mean, Boileau), that the
+machines of our Christian religion in heroic poetry are much more
+feeble to support that weight than those of heathenism.  Their
+doctrine, grounded as it was on ridiculous fables, was yet the
+belief of the two victorious monarchies, the Grecian and Roman.
+Their gods did not only interest themselves in the event of wars
+(which is the effect of a superior Providence), but also espoused
+the several parties in a visible corporeal descent, managed their
+intrigues and fought their battles, sometimes in opposition to each
+other; though Virgil (more discreet than Homer in that last
+particular) has contented himself with the partiality of his
+deities, their favours, their counsels or commands, to those whose
+cause they had espoused, without bringing them to the outrageousness
+of blows.  Now our religion, says he, is deprived of the greatest
+part of those machines--at least, the most shining in epic poetry.
+Though St. Michael in Ariosto seeks out Discord to send her amongst
+the Pagans, and finds her in a convent of friars, where peace should
+reign (which indeed is fine satire); and Satan in Tasso excites
+Soliman to an attempt by night on the Christian camp, and brings a
+host of devils to his assistance; yet the Archangel in the former
+example, when Discord was restive and would not be drawn from her
+beloved monastery with fair words, has the whip-hand of her, drags
+her out with many stripes, sets her on God's name about her
+business, and makes her know the difference of strength betwixt a
+nuncio of heaven and a minister of hell.  The same angel in the
+latter instance from Tasso (as if God had never another messenger
+belonging to the court, but was confined, like Jupiter to Mercury,
+and Juno to Iris), when he sees his time--that is, when half of the
+Christians are already killed, and all the rest are in a fair way to
+be routed--stickles betwixt the remainders of God's host and the
+race of fiends, pulls the devils backward by the tails, and drives
+them from their quarry; or otherwise the whole business had
+miscarried, and Jerusalem remained untaken.  This, says Boileau, is
+a very unequal match for the poor devils, who are sure to come by
+the worst of it in the combat; for nothing is more easy than for an
+Almighty Power to bring His old rebels to reason when He pleases.
+Consequently what pleasure, what entertainment, can be raised from
+so pitiful a machine, where we see the success of the battle from
+the very beginning of it? unless that as we are Christians, we are
+glad that we have gotten God on our side to maul our enemies when we
+cannot do the work ourselves.  For if the poet had given the
+faithful more courage, which had cost him nothing, or at least have
+made them exceed the Turks in number, he might have gained the
+victory for us Christians without interesting Heaven in the quarrel,
+and that with as much ease and as little credit to the conqueror as
+when a party of a hundred soldiers defeats another which consists
+only of fifty.
+
+This, my lord, I confess is such an argument against our modern
+poetry as cannot be answered by those mediums which have been used.
+We cannot hitherto boast that our religion has furnished us with any
+such machines as have made the strength and beauty of the ancient
+buildings.
+
+But what if I venture to advance an invention of my own to supply
+the manifest defect of our new writers?  I am sufficiently sensible
+of my weakness, and it is not very probable that I should succeed in
+such a project, whereof I have not had the least hint from any of my
+predecessors the poets, or any of their seconds or coadjutors the
+critics.  Yet we see the art of war is improved in sieges, and new
+instruments of death are invented daily.  Something new in
+philosophy and the mechanics is discovered almost every year, and
+the science of former ages is improved by the succeeding.  I will
+not detain you with a long preamble to that which better judges
+will, perhaps, conclude to be little worth.
+
+It is this, in short--that Christian poets have not hitherto been
+acquainted with their own strength.  If they had searched the Old
+Testament as they ought, they might there have found the machines
+which are proper for their work, and those more certain in their
+effect than it may be the New Testament is in the rules sufficient
+for salvation.  The perusing of one chapter in the prophecy of
+Daniel, and accommodating what there they find with the principles
+of Platonic philosophy as it is now Christianised, would have made
+the ministry of angels as strong an engine for the working up heroic
+poetry in our religion as that of the ancients has been to raise
+theirs by all the fables of their gods, which were only received for
+truths by the most ignorant and weakest of the people.
+
+It is a doctrine almost universally received by Christians, as well
+Protestants as Catholics, that there are guardian angels appointed
+by God Almighty as His vicegerents for the protection and government
+of cities, provinces, kingdoms, and monarchies; and those as well of
+heathens as of true believers.  All this is so plainly proved from
+those texts of Daniel that it admits of no farther controversy.  The
+prince of the Persians, and that other of the Grecians, are granted
+to be the guardians and protecting ministers of those empires.  It
+cannot be denied that they were opposite and resisted one another.
+St. Michael is mentioned by his name as the patron of the Jews, and
+is now taken by the Christians as the protector-general of our
+religion.  These tutelar genii, who presided over the several people
+and regions committed to their charge, were watchful over them for
+good, as far as their commissions could possibly extend.  The
+general purpose and design of all was certainly the service of their
+great Creator.  But it is an undoubted truth that, for ends best
+known to the Almighty Majesty of Heaven, His providential designs
+for the benefit of His creatures, for the debasing and punishing of
+some nations, and the exaltation and temporal reward of others, were
+not wholly known to these His ministers; else why those factious
+quarrels, controversies, and battles amongst themselves, when they
+were all united in the same design, the service and honour of their
+common master?  But being instructed only in the general, and
+zealous of the main design, and as finite beings not admitted into
+the secrets of government, the last resorts of Providence, or
+capable of discovering the final purposes of God (who can work good
+out of evil as He pleases, and irresistibly sways all manner of
+events on earth, directing them finally for the best to His creation
+in general, and to the ultimate end of His own glory in particular),
+they must of necessity be sometimes ignorant of the means conducing
+to those ends, in which alone they can jar and oppose each other--
+one angel, as we may suppose (the Prince of Persia, as he is
+called), judging that it would be more for God's honour and the
+benefit of His people that the Median and Persian monarchy, which
+delivered them from the Babylonish captivity, should still be
+uppermost; and the patron of the Grecians, to whom the will of God
+might be more particularly revealed, contending on the other side
+for the rise of Alexander and his successors, who were appointed to
+punish the backsliding Jews, and thereby to put them in mind of
+their offences, that they might repent and become more virtuous and
+more observant of the law revealed.  But how far these controversies
+and appearing enmities of those glorious creatures may be carried;
+how these oppositions may be best managed, and by what means
+conducted, is not my business to show or determine:  these things
+must be left to the invention and judgment of the poet, if any of so
+happy a genius be now living, or any future age can produce a man
+who, being conversant in the philosophy of Plato as it is now
+accommodated to Christian use (for, as Virgil gives us to understand
+by his example, that is the only proper, of all others, for an epic
+poem), who to his natural endowments of a large invention, a ripe
+judgment, and a strong memory, has joined the knowledge of the
+liberal arts and sciences (and particularly moral philosophy, the
+mathematics, geography, and history), and with all these
+qualifications is born a poet, knows, and can practise the variety
+of numbers, and is master of the language in which he writes--if
+such a man, I say, be now arisen, or shall arise, I am vain enough
+to think that I have proposed a model to him by which he may build a
+nobler, a more beautiful, and more perfect poem than any yet extant
+since the ancients.
+
+There is another part of these machines yet wanting; but by what I
+have said, it would have been easily supplied by a judicious writer.
+He could not have failed to add the opposition of ill spirits to the
+good; they have also their design, ever opposite to that of Heaven;
+and this alone has hitherto been the practice of the moderns:  but
+this imperfect system, if I may call it such, which I have given,
+will infinitely advance and carry farther that hypothesis of the
+evil spirits contending with the good.  For being so much weaker
+since their fall than those blessed beings, they are yet supposed to
+have a permitted power from God of acting ill, as from their own
+depraved nature they have always the will of designing it--a great
+testimony of which we find in Holy Writ, when God Almighty suffered
+Satan to appear in the holy synod of the angels (a thing not
+hitherto drawn into example by any of the poets), and also gave him
+power over all things belonging to his servant Job, excepting only
+life.
+
+Now what these wicked spirits cannot compass by the vast
+disproportion of their forces to those of the superior beings, they
+may by their fraud and cunning carry farther in a seeming league,
+confederacy, or subserviency to the designs of some good angel, as
+far as consists with his purity to suffer such an aid, the end of
+which may possibly be disguised and concealed from his finite
+knowledge.  This is indeed to suppose a great error in such a being;
+yet since a devil can appear like an angel of light, since craft and
+malice may sometimes blind for a while a more perfect understanding;
+and lastly, since Milton has given us an example of the like nature,
+when Satan, appearing like a cherub to Uriel, the intelligence of
+the sun, circumvented him even in his own province, and passed only
+for a curious traveller through those new-created regions, that he
+might observe therein the workmanship of God and praise Him in His
+works--I know not why, upon the same supposition, or some other, a
+fiend may not deceive a creature of more excellency than himself,
+but yet a creature; at least, by the connivance or tacit permission
+of the Omniscient Being.
+
+Thus, my lord, I have, as briefly as I could, given your lordship,
+and by you the world, a rude draught of what I have been long
+labouring in my imagination, and what I had intended to have put in
+practice (though far unable for the attempt of such a poem), and to
+have left the stage, to which my genius never much inclined me, for
+a work which would have taken up my life in the performance of it.
+This, too, I had intended chiefly for the honour of my native
+country, to which a poet is particularly obliged.  Of two subjects,
+both relating to it, I was doubtful--whether I should choose that of
+King Arthur conquering the Saxons (which, being farther distant in
+time, gives the greater scope to my invention), or that of Edward
+the Black Prince in subduing Spain and restoring it to the lawful
+prince, though a great tyrant, Don Pedro the Cruel--which for the
+compass of time, including only the expedition of one year; for the
+greatness of the action, and its answerable event; for the
+magnanimity of the English hero, opposed to the ingratitude of the
+person whom he restored; and for the many beautiful episodes which I
+had interwoven with the principal design, together with the
+characters of the chiefest English persons (wherein, after Virgil
+and Spenser, I would have taken occasion to represent my living
+friends and patrons of the noblest families, and also shadowed the
+events of future ages in the succession of our imperial line)--with
+these helps, and those of the machines which I have mentioned, I
+might perhaps have done as well as some of my predecessors, or at
+least chalked out a way for others to amend my errors in a like
+design; but being encouraged only with fair words by King Charles
+the Second, my little salary ill paid, and no prospect of a future
+subsistence, I was then discouraged in the beginning of my attempt;
+and now age has overtaken me, and want (a more insufferable evil)
+through the change of the times has wholly disenabled me; though I
+must ever acknowledge, to the honour of your lordship, and the
+eternal memory of your charity, that since this Revolution, wherein
+I have patiently suffered the ruin of my small fortune, and the loss
+of that poor subsistence which I had from two kings, whom I had
+served more faithfully than profitably to myself--then your lordship
+was pleased, out of no other motive but your own nobleness, without
+any desert of mine, or the least solicitation from me, to make me a
+most bountiful present, which at that time, when I was most in want
+of it, came most seasonably and unexpectedly to my relief.  That
+favour, my lord, is of itself sufficient to bind any grateful man to
+a perpetual acknowledgment, and to all the future service which one
+of my mean condition can be ever able to perform.  May the Almighty
+God return it for me, both in blessing you here and rewarding you
+hereafter!  I must not presume to defend the cause for which I now
+suffer, because your lordship is engaged against it; but the more
+you are so, the greater is my obligation to you for your laying
+aside all the considerations of factions and parties to do an action
+of pure disinterested charity.  This is one amongst many of your
+shining qualities which distinguish you from others of your rank.
+But let me add a farther truth--that without these ties of
+gratitude, and abstracting from them all, I have a most particular
+inclination to honour you, and, if it were not too bold an
+expression, to say I love you.  It is no shame to be a poet, though
+it is to be a bad one.  Augustus Caesar of old, and Cardinal
+Richelieu of late, would willingly have been such; and David and
+Solomon were such.  You who, without flattery, are the best of the
+present age in England, and would have been so had you been born in
+any other country, will receive more honour in future ages by that
+one excellency than by all those honours to which your birth has
+entitled you, or your merits have acquired you.
+
+
+"Ne forte pudori
+Sit tibi Musa lyrae solers, et cantor Apollo."
+
+
+I have formerly said in this epistle that I could distinguish your
+writings from those of any others; it is now time to clear myself
+from any imputation of self-conceit on that subject.  I assume not
+to myself any particular lights in this discovery; they are such
+only as are obvious to every man of sense and judgment who loves
+poetry and understands it.  Your thoughts are always so remote from
+the common way of thinking that they are, as I may say, of another
+species than the conceptions of other poets; yet you go not out of
+nature for any of them.  Gold is never bred upon the surface of the
+ground, but lies so hidden and so deep that the mines of it are
+seldom found; but the force of waters casts it out from the bowels
+of mountains, and exposes it amongst the sands of rivers, giving us
+of her bounty what we could not hope for by our search.  This
+success attends your lordship's thoughts, which would look like
+chance if it were not perpetual and always of the same tenor.  If I
+grant that there is care in it, it is such a care as would be
+ineffectual and fruitless in other men; it is the curiosa felicitas
+which Petronius ascribes to Horace in his odes.  We have not
+wherewithal to imagine so strongly, so justly, and so pleasantly:
+in short, if we have the same knowledge, we cannot draw out of it
+the same quintessence; we cannot give it such a turn, such a
+propriety, and such a beauty.  Something is deficient in the manner
+or the words, but more in the nobleness of our conception.  Yet when
+you have finished all, and it appears in its full lustre; when the
+diamond is not only found, but the roughness smoothed; when it is
+cut into a form and set in gold, then we cannot but acknowledge that
+it is the perfect work of art and nature; and every one will be so
+vain to think he himself could have performed the like until he
+attempts it.  It is just the description that Horace makes of such a
+finished piece; it appears so easy,
+
+
+"Ut sibi quivis
+Speret idem, sudet multum, frustraque laboret,
+Ausus idem."
+
+
+And besides all this, it is your lordship's particular talent to lay
+your thoughts so chose together that, were they closer, they would
+be crowded, and even a due connection would be wanting.  We are not
+kept in expectation of two good lines which are to come after a long
+parenthesis of twenty bad; which is the April poetry of other
+writers, a mixture of rain and sunshine by fits:  you are always
+bright, even almost to a fault, by reason of the excess.  There is
+continual abundance, a magazine of thought, and yet a perpetual
+variety of entertainment; which creates such an appetite in your
+reader that he is not cloyed with anything, but satisfied with all.
+It is that which the Romans call caena dubia; where there is such
+plenty, yet withal so much diversity, and so good order, that the
+choice is difficult betwixt one excellency and another; and yet the
+conclusion, by a due climax, is evermore the best--that is, as a
+conclusion ought to be, ever the most proper for its place.  See, my
+lord, whether I have not studied your lordship with some
+application:  and since you are so modest that you will not be judge
+and party, I appeal to the whole world if I have not drawn your
+picture to a great degree of likeness, though it is but in
+miniature, and that some of the best features are yet wanting.  Yet
+what I have done is enough to distinguish you from any other, which
+is the proposition that I took upon me to demonstrate.
+
+And now, my lord, to apply what I have said to my present business:
+the satires of Juvenal and Persius, appearing in this new English
+dress, cannot so properly be inscribed to any man as to your
+lordship, who are the first of the age in that way of writing.  Your
+lordship, amongst many other favours, has given me your permission
+for this address; and you have particularly encouraged me by your
+perusal and approbation of the sixth and tenth satires of Juvenal as
+I have translated them.  My fellow-labourers have likewise
+commissioned me to perform in their behalf this office of a
+dedication to you, and will acknowledge, with all possible respect
+and gratitude, your acceptance of their work.  Some of them have the
+honour to be known to your lordship already; and they who have not
+yet that happiness, desire it now.  Be pleased to receive our common
+endeavours with your wonted candour, without entitling you to the
+protection of our common failings in so difficult an undertaking.
+And allow me your patience, if it be not already tired with this
+long epistle, to give you from the best authors the origin, the
+antiquity, the growth, the change, and the completement of satire
+among the Romans; to describe, if not define, the nature of that
+poem, with its several qualifications and virtues, together with the
+several sorts of it; to compare the excellencies of Horace, Persius,
+and Juvenal, and show the particular manners of their satires; and,
+lastly, to give an account of this new way of version which is
+attempted in our performance:  all which, according to the weakness
+of my ability, and the best lights which I can get from others,
+shall be the subject of my following discourse.
+
+The most perfect work of poetry, says our master Aristotle, is
+tragedy.  His reason is because it is the most united; being more
+severely confined within the rules of action, time, and place.  The
+action is entire of a piece, and one without episodes; the time
+limited to a natural day; and the place circumscribed at least
+within the compass of one town or city.  Being exactly proportioned
+thus, and uniform in all its parts, the mind is more capable of
+comprehending the whole beauty of it without distraction.
+
+But after all these advantages an heroic poem is certainly the
+greatest work of human nature.  The beauties and perfections of the
+other are but mechanical; those of the epic are more noble.  Though
+Homer has limited his place to Troy and the fields about it; his
+actions to forty-eight natural days, whereof twelve are holidays, or
+cessation from business during the funeral of Patroclus.  To
+proceed:  the action of the epic is greater; the extension of time
+enlarges the pleasure of the reader, and the episodes give it more
+ornament and more variety.  The instruction is equal; but the first
+is only instructive, the latter forms a hero and a prince.
+
+If it signifies anything which of them is of the more ancient
+family, the best and most absolute heroic poem was written by Homer
+long before tragedy was invented.  But if we consider the natural
+endowments and acquired parts which are necessary to make an
+accomplished writer in either kind, tragedy requires a less and more
+confined knowledge; moderate learning and observation of the rules
+is sufficient if a genius be not wanting.  But in an epic poet, one
+who is worthy of that name, besides an universal genius is required
+universal learning, together with all those qualities and
+acquisitions which I have named above, and as many more as I have
+through haste or negligence omitted.  And, after all, he must have
+exactly studied Homer and Virgil as his patterns, Aristotle and
+Horace as his guides, and Vida and Bossu as their commentators, with
+many others (both Italian and French critics) which I want leisure
+here to recommend.
+
+In a word, what I have to say in relation to this subject, which
+does not particularly concern satire, is that the greatness of an
+heroic poem beyond that of a tragedy may easily be discovered by
+observing how few have attempted that work, in comparison to those
+who have written dramas; and of those few, how small a number have
+succeeded.  But leaving the critics on either side to contend about
+the preference due to this or that sort of poetry, I will hasten to
+my present business, which is the antiquity and origin of satire,
+according to those informations which I have received from the
+learned Casaubon, Heinsius, Rigaltius, Dacier, and the Dauphin's
+Juvenal, to which I shall add some observations of my own.
+
+There has been a long dispute among the modern critics whether the
+Romans derived their satire from the Grecians or first invented it
+themselves.  Julius Scaliger and Heinsius are of the first opinion;
+Casaubon, Rigaltius, Dacier, and the publisher of Dauphin's Juvenal
+maintain the latter.  If we take satire in the general signification
+of the word, as it is used in all modern languages, for an
+invective, it is certain that it is almost as old as verse; and
+though hymns, which are praises of God, may be allowed to have been
+before it, yet the defamation of others was not long after it.
+After God had cursed Adam and Eve in Paradise, the husband and wife
+excused themselves by laying the blame on one another, and gave a
+beginning to those conjugal dialogues in prose which the poets have
+perfected in verse.  The third chapter of Job is one of the first
+instances of this poem in Holy Scripture, unless we will take it
+higher, from the latter end of the second, where his wife advises
+him to curse his Maker.
+
+This original, I confess, is not much to the honour of satire; but
+here it was nature, and that depraved:  when it became an art, it
+bore better fruit.  Only we have learnt thus much already--that
+scoffs and revilings are of the growth of all nations; and
+consequently that neither the Greek poets borrowed from other people
+their art of railing, neither needed the Romans to take it from
+them.  But considering satire as a species of poetry, here the war
+begins amongst the critics.  Scaliger, the father, will have it
+descend from Greece to Rome; and derives the word "satire" from
+Satyrus, that mixed kind of animal (or, as the ancients thought him,
+rural god) made up betwixt a man and a goat, with a human head,
+hooked nose, pouting lips, a bunch or struma under the chin, pricked
+ears, and upright horns; the body shagged with hair, especially from
+the waist, and ending in a goat, with the legs and feet of that
+creature.  But Casaubon and his followers, with reason, condemn this
+derivation, and prove that from Satyrus the word satira, as it
+signifies a poem, cannot possibly descend.  For satira is not
+properly a substantive, but an adjective; to which the word lanx (in
+English a "charger" or "large platter") is understood:  so that the
+Greek poem made according to the manners of a  Satyr, and expressing
+his qualities, must properly be called satirical, and not satire.
+And thus far it is allowed that the Grecians had such poems, but
+that they were wholly different in species from that to which the
+Romans gave the name of satire.
+
+Aristotle divides all poetry, in relation to the progress of it,
+into nature without art, art begun, and art completed.  Mankind,
+even the most barbarous, have the seeds of poetry implanted in them.
+The first specimen of it was certainly shown in the praises of the
+Deity and prayers to Him; and as they are of natural obligation, so
+they are likewise of divine institution:  which Milton observing,
+introduces Adam and Eve every morning adoring God in hymns and
+prayers.  The first poetry was thus begun in the wild notes of
+natural poetry before the invention of feet and measures.  The
+Grecians and Romans had no other original of their poetry.
+Festivals and holidays soon succeeded to private worship, and we
+need not doubt but they were enjoined by the true God to His own
+people, as they were afterwards imitated by the heathens; who by the
+light of reason knew they were to invoke some superior being in
+their necessities, and to thank him for his benefits.  Thus the
+Grecian holidays were celebrated with offerings to Bacchus and Ceres
+and other deities, to whose bounty they supposed they were owing for
+their corn and wine and other helps of life.  And the ancient
+Romans, as Horace tells us, paid their thanks to Mother Earth or
+Vesta, to Silvanus, and their Genius in the same manner.  But as all
+festivals have a double reason of their institution--the first of
+religion, the other of recreation for the unbending of our minds--so
+both the Grecians and Romans agreed (after their sacrifices were
+performed) to spend the remainder of the day in sports and
+merriments; amongst which songs and dances, and that which they
+called wit (for want of knowing better), were the chiefest
+entertainments.  The Grecians had a notion of Satyrs, whom I have
+already described; and taking them and the Sileni--that is, the
+young Satyrs and the old--for the tutors, attendants, and humble
+companions of their Bacchus, habited themselves like those rural
+deities, and imitated them in their rustic dances, to which they
+joined songs with some sort of rude harmony, but without certain
+numbers; and to these they added a kind of chorus.
+
+The Romans also, as nature is the same in all places, though they
+knew nothing of those Grecian demi-gods, nor had any communication
+with Greece, yet had certain young men who at their festivals danced
+and sang after their uncouth manner to a certain kind of verse which
+they called Saturnian.  What it was we have no certain light from
+antiquity to discover; but we may conclude that, like the Grecian,
+it was void of art, or, at least, with very feeble beginnings of it.
+Those ancient Romans at these holy days, which were a mixture of
+devotion and debauchery, had a custom of reproaching each other with
+their faults in a sort of extempore poetry, or rather of tunable
+hobbling verse, and they answered in the same kind of gross
+raillery--their wit and their music being of a piece.  The Grecians,
+says Casaubon, had formerly done the same in the persons of their
+petulant Satyrs; but I am afraid he mistakes the matter, and
+confounds the singing and dancing of the Satyrs with the rustical
+entertainments of the first Romans.  The reason of my opinion is
+this:  that Casaubon finding little light from antiquity of these
+beginnings of poetry amongst the Grecians, but only these
+representations of Satyrs who carried canisters and cornucopias full
+of several fruits in their hands, and danced with them at their
+public feasts, and afterwards reading Horace, who makes mention of
+his homely Romans jesting at one another in the same kind of
+solemnities, might suppose those wanton Satyrs did the same; and
+especially because Horace possibly might seem to him to have shown
+the original of all poetry in general (including the Grecians as
+well as Romans), though it is plainly otherwise that he only
+described the beginning and first rudiments of poetry in his own
+country.  The verses are these, which he cites from the First
+Epistle of the Second Book, which was written to Augustus:-
+
+
+"Agricolae prisci, fortes, parvoque beati,
+Condita post frumenta, levantes tempore festo
+Corpus, et ipsum animum spe finis dura ferentem,
+Cum sociis operum, et pueris, et conjuge fida,
+Tellurem porco, Silvanum lacte piabant;
+Floribus et vino Genium memorem brevis aevi.
+Fescennina per hunc inventa licentia morem
+Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit."
+
+
+"Our brawny clowns of old, who turned the soil,
+Content with little, and inured to toil,
+At harvest-home, with mirth and country cheer,
+Restored their bodies for another year,
+Refreshed their spirits, and renewed their hope
+Of such a future feast and future crop.
+Then with their fellow-joggers of the ploughs,
+Their little children, and their faithful spouse,
+A sow they slew to Vesta's deity,
+And kindly milk, Silvanus, poured to thee.
+With flowers and wine their Genius they adored;
+A short life and a merry was the word.
+From flowing cups defaming rhymes ensue,
+And at each other homely taunts they threw."
+
+
+Yet since it is a hard conjecture that so great a man as Casaubon
+should misapply what Horace writ concerning ancient Rome to the
+ceremonies and manners of ancient Greece, I will not insist on this
+opinion, but rather judge in general that since all poetry had its
+original from religion, that of the Grecians and Rome had the same
+beginning.  Both were invented at festivals of thanksgiving, and
+both were prosecuted with mirth and raillery and rudiments of
+verses; amongst the Greeks by those who represented Satyrs, and
+amongst the Romans by real clowns.
+
+For, indeed, when I am reading Casaubon on these two subjects
+methinks I hear the same story told twice over with very little
+alteration.  Of which Dacier, taking notice in his interpretation of
+the Latin verses which I have translated, says plainly that the
+beginning of poetry was the same, with a small variety, in both
+countries, and that the mother of it in all nations was devotion.
+But what is yet more wonderful, that most learned critic takes
+notice also, in his illustrations on the First Epistle of the Second
+Book, that as the poetry of the Romans and that of the Grecians had
+the same beginning at feasts and thanksgiving (as it has been
+observed), and the old comedy of the Greeks (which was invective)
+and the satire of the Romans (which was of the same nature) were
+begun on the very same occasion, so the fortune of both in process
+of time was just the same--the old comedy of the Grecians was
+forbidden for its too much licence in exposing of particular
+persons, and the rude satire of the Romans was also punished by a
+law of the Decemviri, as Horace tells us in these words:-
+
+
+"Libertasque recurrentes accepta per annos
+Lusit amabiliter; donec jam saevus apertam
+In rabiem verti caepit jocus, et per honestas
+Ire domos impune minax:  doluere cruento
+Dente lacessiti; fuit intactis quoque cura
+Conditione super communi:  quinetiam lex,
+Paenaque lata, malo quae nollet carmine quenquam
+Describi:  vertere modum, formidine fustis
+Ad benedicendum delectandumque redacti."
+
+
+The law of the Decemviri was this:  Siquis occentassit malum carmen,
+sive condidissit, quod infamiam faxit, flagitiumve alteri, capital
+esto.  A strange likeness, and barely possible; but the critics
+being all of the same opinion, it becomes me to be silent and to
+submit to better judgments than my own.
+
+But to return to the Grecians, from whose satiric dramas the elder
+Scaliger and Heinsius will have the Roman satire to proceed; I am to
+take a view of them first, and see if there be any such descent from
+them as those authors have pretended.
+
+Thespis, or whoever he were that invented tragedy (for authors
+differ), mingled with them a chorus and dances of Satyrs which had
+before been used in the celebration of their festivals, and there
+they were ever afterwards retained.  The character of them was also
+kept, which was mirth and wantonness; and this was given, I suppose,
+to the folly of the common audience, who soon grow weary of good
+sense, and, as we daily see in our own age and country, are apt to
+forsake poetry, and still ready to return to buffoonery and farce.
+From hence it came that in the Olympic Games, where the poets
+contended for four prizes, the satiric tragedy was the last of them,
+for in the rest the Satyrs were excluded from the chorus.  Amongst
+the plays of Euripides which are yet remaining, there is one of
+these satirics, which is called The Cyclops, in which we may see the
+nature of those poems, and from thence conclude what likeness they
+have to the Roman satire.
+
+The story of this Cyclops, whose name was Polyphemus (so famous in
+the Grecian fables), was that Ulysses, who with his company was
+driven on the coast of Sicily, where those Cyclops inhabited, coming
+to ask relief from Silenus and the Satyrs, who were herdsmen to that
+one-eyed giant, was kindly received by them, and entertained till,
+being perceived by Polyphemus, they were made prisoners against the
+rites of hospitality (for which Ulysses eloquently pleaded), were
+afterwards put down into the den, and some of them devoured; after
+which Ulysses (having made him drunk when he was asleep) thrust a
+great fire-brand into his eye, and so revenging his dead followers
+escaped with the remaining party of the living, and Silenus and the
+Satyrs were freed from their servitude under Polyphemus and remitted
+to their first liberty of attending and accompanying their patron
+Bacchus.
+
+This was the subject of the tragedy, which, being one of those that
+end with a happy event, is therefore by Aristotle judged below the
+other sort, whose success is unfortunate; notwithstanding which, the
+Satyrs (who were part of the dramatis personae, as well as the whole
+chorus) were properly introduced into the nature of the poem, which
+is mixed of farce and tragedy.  The adventure of Ulysses was to
+entertain the judging part of the audience, and the uncouth persons
+of Silenus and the Satyrs to divert the common people with their
+gross railleries.
+
+Your lordship has perceived by this time that this satiric tragedy
+and the Roman satire have little resemblance in any of their
+features.  The very kinds are different; for what has a pastoral
+tragedy to do with a paper of verses satirically written?  The
+character and raillery of the Satyrs is the only thing that could
+pretend to a likeness, were Scaliger and Heinsius alive to maintain
+their opinion.  And the first farces of the Romans, which were the
+rudiments of their poetry, were written before they had any
+communication with the Greeks, or indeed any knowledge of that
+people.
+
+And here it will be proper to give the definition of the Greek
+satiric poem from Casaubon before I leave this subject.  "The
+'satiric,'" says he, "is a dramatic poem annexed to a tragedy having
+a chorus which consists of Satyrs.  The persons represented in it
+are illustrious men, the action of it is great, the style is partly
+serious and partly jocular, and the event of the action most
+commonly is happy."
+
+The Grecians, besides these satiric tragedies, had another kind of
+poem, which they called "silli," which were more of kin to the Roman
+satire.  Those "silli" were indeed invective poems, but of a
+different species from the Roman poems of Ennius, Pacuvius,
+Lucilius, Horace, and the rest of their successors.  "They were so
+called," says Casaubon in one place, "from Silenus, the foster-
+father of Bacchus;" but in another place, bethinking himself better,
+he derives their name [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] from
+their scoffing and petulancy.  From some fragments of the "silli"
+written by Timon we may find that they were satiric poems, full of
+parodies; that is, of verses patched up from great poets, and turned
+into another sense than their author intended them.  Such amongst
+the Romans is the famous Cento of Ausonius, where the words are
+Virgil's, but by applying them to another sense they are made a
+relation of a wedding-night, and the act of consummation fulsomely
+described in the very words of the most modest amongst all poets.
+Of the same manner are our songs which are turned into burlesque,
+and the serious words of the author perverted into a ridiculous
+meaning.  Thus in Timon's "silli" the words are generally those of
+Homer and the tragic poets, but he applies them satirically to some
+customs and kinds of philosophy which he arraigns.  But the Romans
+not using any of these parodies in their satires--sometimes indeed
+repeating verses of other men, as Persius cites some of Nero's, but
+not turning them into another meaning--the "silli" cannot be
+supposed to be the original of Roman satire.  To these "silli,"
+consisting of parodies, we may properly add the satires which were
+written against particular persons, such as were the iambics of
+Archilochus against Lycambes, which Horace undoubtedly imitated in
+some of his odes and epodes, whose titles bear sufficient witness of
+it:  I might also name the invective of Ovid against Ibis, and many
+others.  But these are the underwood of satire rather than the
+timber-trees; they are not of general extension, as reaching only to
+some individual person.  And Horace seems to have purged himself
+from those splenetic reflections in those odes and epodes before he
+undertook the noble work of satires, which were properly so called.
+
+Thus, my lord, I have at length disengaged myself from those
+antiquities of Greece, and have proved, I hope, from the best
+critics, that the Roman satire was not borrowed from thence, but of
+their own manufacture.  I am now almost gotten into my depth; at
+least, by the help of Dacier, I am swimming towards it.  Not that I
+will promise always to follow him, any more than he follows
+Casaubon; but to keep him in my eye as my best and truest guide; and
+where I think he may possibly mislead me, there to have recourse to
+my own lights, as I expect that others should do by me.
+
+Quintilian says in plain words, Satira quidem tota nostra est; and
+Horace had said the same thing before him, speaking of his
+predecessor in that sort of poetry, et Graecis intacti carminis
+auctor.  Nothing can be clearer than the opinion of the poet and the
+orator (both the best critics of the two best ages of the Roman
+empire), that satire was wholly of Latin growth, and not
+transplanted to Rome from Athens.  Yet, as I have said, Scaliger the
+father, according to his custom (that is, insolently enough),
+contradicts them both, and gives no better reason than the
+derivation of satyrus from [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]
+salacitas; and so, from the lechery of those fauns, thinks he has
+sufficiently proved that satire is derived from them:  as if
+wantonness and lubricity were essential to that sort of poem, which
+ought to be avoided in it.  His other allegation, which I have
+already mentioned, is as pitiful--that the Satyrs carried platters
+and canisters full of fruit in their hands.  If they had entered
+empty-handed, had they been ever the less Satyrs?  Or were the
+fruits and flowers which they offered anything of kin to satire? or
+any argument that this poem was originally Grecian?  Casaubon judged
+better, and his opinion is grounded on sure authority:  that satire
+was derived from satura, a Roman word which signifies full and
+abundant, and full also of variety, in which nothing is wanting to
+its due perfection.  It is thus, says Denier, that we say a full
+colour, when the wool has taken the whole tincture and drunk in as
+much of the dye as it can receive.  According to this derivation,
+from setur comes satura or satira, according to the new spelling, as
+optumus and maxumus are now spelled optimus and maximus.  Satura, as
+I have formerly noted, is an adjective, and relates to the word
+lanx, which is understood; and this lanx (in English a "charger" or
+"large platter") was yearly filled with all sorts of fruits, which
+were offered to the gods at their festivals as the premices or first
+gatherings.  These offerings of several sorts thus mingled, it is
+true, were not unknown to the Grecians, who called them [Greek text
+which cannot be reproduced] a sacrifice of all sorts of fruits; and
+[Greek text which cannot be reproduced], when they offered all kinds
+of grain.  Virgil has mentioned these sacrifices in his "Georgics":-
+
+
+"Lancibus et pandis fumantia reddimus exta;"
+
+
+and in another place, lancesque et liba feremus--that is, "We offer
+the smoking entrails in great platters; and we will offer the
+chargers and the cakes."
+
+This word satura has been afterward applied to many other sorts of
+mixtures; as Festus calls it, a kind of olla or hotch-potch made of
+several sorts of meats.  Laws were also called leges saturae when
+they were of several heads and titles, like our tacked Bills of
+Parliament; and per saturam legem ferre in the Roman senate was to
+carry a law without telling the senators, or counting voices, when
+they were in haste.  Sallust uses the word, per saturam sententias
+exquirere, when the majority was visibly on one side.  From hence it
+might probably be conjectured that the Discourses or Satires of
+Ennius, Lucilius, and Horace, as we now call them, took their name,
+because they are full of various matters, and are also written on
+various subjects--as Porphyrius says.  But Dacier affirms that it is
+not immediately from thence that these satires are so called, for
+that name had been used formerly for other things which bore a
+nearer resemblance to those discourses of Horace; in explaining of
+which, continues Dacier, a method is to be pursued of which Casaubon
+himself has never thought, and which will put all things into so
+clear a light that no further room will be left for the least
+dispute.
+
+During the space of almost four hundred years since the building of
+their city the Romans had never known any entertainments of the
+stage.  Chance and jollity first found out those verses which they
+called Saturnian and Fescennine; or rather human nature, which is
+inclined to poetry, first produced them rude and barbarous and
+unpolished, as all other operations of the soul are in their
+beginnings before they are cultivated with art and study.  However,
+in occasions of merriment, they were first practised; and this
+rough-cast, unhewn poetry was instead of stage-plays for the space
+of a hundred and twenty years together.  They were made extempore,
+and were, as the French call them, impromptus; for which the
+Tarsians of old were much renowned, and we see the daily examples of
+them in the Italian farces of Harlequin and Scaramucha.  Such was
+the poetry of that savage people before it was tuned into numbers
+and the harmony of verse.  Little of the Saturnian verses is now
+remaining; we only know from authors that they were nearer prose
+than poetry, without feet or measure.  They were [Greek text which
+cannot be reproduced] but not [Greek text which cannot be
+reproduced].  Perhaps they might be used in the solemn part of their
+ceremonies; and the Fescennine, which were invented after them, in
+their afternoons' debauchery, because they were scoffing and
+obscene.
+
+The Fescennine and Saturnian were the same; for as they were called
+Saturnian from their ancientness, when Saturn reigned in Italy, they
+were also called Fescennine, from Fescennia, a town in the same
+country where they were first practised.  The actors, with a gross
+and rustic kind of raillery, reproached each other with their
+failings, and at the same time were nothing sparing of it to their
+audience.  Somewhat of this custom was afterwards retained in their
+Saturnalia, or Feasts of Saturn, celebrated in December; at least,
+all kind of freedom in speech was then allowed to slaves, even
+against their masters; and we are not without some imitation of it
+in our Christmas gambols.  Soldiers also used those Fescennine
+verses, after measure and numbers had been added to them, at the
+triumph of their generals; of which we have an example in the
+triumph of Julius Caesar over Gaul in these expressions:  Caesar
+Gallias subegit, Nicomedes Caesarem.  Ecce Caesar nunc triumphat,
+qui subegit Gallias; Nicomedes non triumphat, qui subegit Caesarem.
+The vapours of wine made those first satirical poets amongst the
+Romans, which, says Dacier, we cannot better represent than by
+imagining a company of clowns on a holiday dancing lubberly and
+upbraiding one another in extempore doggerel with their defects and
+vices, and the stories that were told of them in bake-houses and
+barbers' shops.
+
+When they began to be somewhat better bred, and were entering, as I
+may say, into the first rudiments of civil conversation, they left
+these hedge-notes for another sort of poem, somewhat polished, which
+was also full of pleasant raillery, but without any mixture of
+obscenity.  This sort of poetry appeared under the name of "satire"
+because of its variety; and this satire was adorned with
+compositions of music, and with dances; but lascivious postures were
+banished from it.  In the Tuscan language, says Livy, the word
+hister signifies a player; and therefore those actors which were
+first brought from Etruria to Rome on occasion of a pestilence, when
+the Romans were admonished to avert the anger of the gods by plays
+(in the year ab urbe condita CCCXC.)--those actors, I say, were
+therefore called histriones:  and that name has since remained, not
+only to actors Roman born, but to all others of every nation.  They
+played, not the former extempore stuff of Fescennine verses or
+clownish jests, but what they acted was a kind of civil cleanly
+farce, with music and dances, and motions that were proper to the
+subject.
+
+In this condition Livius Andronicus found the stage when he
+attempted first, instead of farces, to supply it with a nobler
+entertainment of tragedies and comedies.  This man was a Grecian
+born, and being made a slave by Livius Salinator, and brought to
+Rome, had the education of his patron's children committed to him,
+which trust he discharged so much to the satisfaction of his master
+that he gave him his liberty.
+
+Andronicus, thus become a freeman of Rome, added to his own name
+that of Livius, his master; and, as I observed, was the first author
+of a regular play in that commonwealth.  Being already instructed in
+his native country in the manners and decencies of the Athenian
+theatre, and conversant in the archaea comaedia or old comedy of
+Aristophanes and the rest of the Grecian poets, he took from that
+model his own designing of plays for the Roman stage, the first of
+which was represented in the year CCCCCXIV. since the building of
+Rome, as Tully, from the Commentaries of Atticus, has assured us; it
+was after the end of the first Punic War, the year before Atticus
+was born.  Dacier has not carried the matter altogether thus far; he
+only says that one Livius Andronicus was the first stage-poet at
+Rome.  But I will adventure on this hint to advance another
+proposition, which I hope the learned will approve; and though we
+have not anything of Andronicus remaining to justify my conjecture,
+yet it is exceeding probable that, having read the works of those
+Grecian wits, his countrymen, he imitated not only the groundwork,
+but also the manner of their writing; and how grave soever his
+tragedies might be, yet in his comedies he expressed the way of
+Aristophanes, Eupolis, and the rest, which was to call some persons
+by their own names, and to expose their defects to the laughter of
+the people (the examples of which we have in the fore-mentioned
+Aristophanes, who turned the wise Socrates into ridicule, and is
+also very free with the management of Cleon, Alcibiades, and other
+ministers of the Athenian government).  Now if this be granted, we
+may easily suppose that the first hint of satirical plays on the
+Roman stage was given by the Greeks--not from the satirica, for that
+has been reasonably exploded in the former part of this discourse--
+but from their old comedy, which was imitated first by Livius
+Andronicus.  And then Quintilian and Horace must be cautiously
+interpreted, where they affirm that satire is wholly Roman, and a
+sort of verse which was not touched on by the Grecians.  The
+reconcilement of my opinion to the standard of their judgment is
+not, however, very difficult, since they spoke of satire, not as in
+its first elements, but as it was formed into a separate work--begun
+by Ennius, pursued by Lucilius, and completed afterwards by Horace.
+The proof depends only on this postalatum--that the comedies of
+Andronicus, which were imitations of the Greek, were also imitations
+of their railleries and reflections on particular persons.  For if
+this be granted me, which is a most probable supposition, it is easy
+to infer that the first light which was given to the Roman
+theatrical satire was from the plays of Livius Andronicus, which
+will be more manifestly discovered when I come to speak of Ennius.
+In the meantime I will return to Dacier.
+
+The people, says he, ran in crowds to these new entertainments of
+Andronicus, as to pieces which were more noble in their kind, and
+more perfect than their former satires, which for some time they
+neglected and abandoned; but not long after they took them up again,
+and then they joined them to their comedies, playing them at the end
+of every drama, as the French continue at this day to act their
+farces, in the nature of a separate entertainment from their
+tragedies.  But more particularly they were joined to the "Atellane"
+fables, says Casaubon; which were plays invented by the Osci.  Those
+fables, says Valerius Maximus, out of Livy, were tempered with the
+Italian severity, and free from any note of infamy or obsceneness;
+and, as an old commentator on Juvenal affirms, the Exodiarii, which
+were singers and dancers, entered to entertain the people with light
+songs and mimical gestures, that they might not go away oppressed
+with melancholy from those serious pieces of the theatre.  So that
+the ancient satire of the Romans was in extempore reproaches; the
+next was farce, which was brought from Tuscany; to that succeeded
+the plays of Andronicus, from the old comedy of the Grecians; and
+out of all these sprang two several branches of new Roman satire,
+like different scions from the same root, which I shall prove with
+as much brevity as the subject will allow.
+
+A year after Andronicus had opened the Roman stage with his new
+dramas, Ennius was born; who, when he was grown to man's estate,
+having seriously considered the genius of the people, and how
+eagerly they followed the first satires, thought it would be worth
+his pains to refine upon the project, and to write satires, not to
+be acted on the theatre, but read.  He preserved the groundwork of
+their pleasantry, their venom, and their raillery on particular
+persons and general vices; and by this means, avoiding the danger of
+any ill success in a public representation, he hoped to be as well
+received in the cabinet as Andronicus had been upon the stage.  The
+event was answerable to his expectation.  He made discourses in
+several sorts of verse, varied often in the same paper, retaining
+still in the title their original name of satire.  Both in relation
+to the subjects, and the variety of matters contained in them, the
+satires of Horace are entirely like them; only Ennius, as I said,
+confines not himself to one sort of verse, as Horace does, but
+taking example from the Greeks, and even from Homer himself in his
+"Margites" (which is a kind of satire, as Scaliger observes), gives
+himself the licence, when one sort of numbers comes not easily, to
+run into another, as his fancy dictates; for he makes no difficulty
+to mingle hexameters with iambic trimeters or with trochaic
+tetrameters, as appears by those fragments which are yet remaining
+of him.  Horace has thought him worthy to be copied, inserting many
+things of his into his own satires, as Virgil has done into his
+"AEneids."
+
+Here we have Dacier making out that Ennius was the first satirist in
+that way of writing, which was of his invention--that is, satire
+abstracted from the stage and new modelled into papers of verses on
+several subjects.  But he will have Ennius take the groundwork of
+satire from the first farces of the Romans rather than from the
+formed plays of Livius Andronicus, which were copied from the
+Grecian comedies.  It may possibly be so; but Dacier knows no more
+of it than I do.  And it seems to me the more probable opinion that
+he rather imitated the fine railleries of the Greeks, which he saw
+in the pieces of Andronicus, than the coarseness of his own
+countrymen in their clownish extemporary way of jeering.
+
+But besides this, it is universally granted that Ennius, though an
+Italian, was excellently learned in the Greek language.  His verses
+were stuffed with fragments of it, even to a fault; and he himself
+believed, according to the Pythagorean opinion, that the soul of
+Homer was transfused into him, which Persius observes in his sixth
+satire--postquam destertuit esse Maeonides.  But this being only the
+private opinion of so inconsiderable a man as I am, I leave it to
+the further disquisition of the critics, if they think it worth
+their notice.  Most evident it is that, whether he imitated the
+Roman farce or the Greek comedies, he is to be acknowledged for the
+first author of Roman satire, as it is properly so called, and
+distinguished from any sort of stage-play.
+
+Of Pacuvius, who succeeded him, there is little to be said, because
+there is so little remaining of him; only that he is taken to be the
+nephew of Ennius, his sister's son; that in probability he was
+instructed by his uncle in his way of satire, which we are told he
+has copied; but what advances he made, we know not.
+
+Lucilius came into the world when Pacuvius flourished most.  He also
+made satires after the manner of Ennius; but he gave them a more
+graceful turn, and endeavoured to imitate more closely the vetus
+comaedia of the Greeks, of the which the old original Roman satire
+had no idea till the time of Livius Andronicus.  And though Horace
+seems to have made Lucilius the first author of satire in verse
+amongst the Romans in these words -
+
+
+"Quid? cum est Lucilius auses
+Primus in hunc operis componere carmina morem" -
+
+
+he is only thus to be understood--that Lucilius had given a more
+graceful turn to the satire of Ennius and Pacuvius, not that he
+invented a new satire of his own; and Quintilian seems to explain
+this passage of Horace in these words:  Satira quidem tota nostra
+est; in qua primus insignem laudem adeptus est Luciluis.
+
+Thus both Horace and Quintilian give a kind of primacy of honour to
+Lucilius amongst the Latin satirists; for as the Roman language grew
+more refined, so much more capable it was of receiving the Grecian
+beauties, in his time.  Horace and Quintilian could mean no more
+than that Lucilius writ better than Ennius and Pacuvius, and on the
+same account we prefer Horace to Lucilius.  Both of them imitated
+the old Greek comedy; and so did Ennius and Pacuvius before them.
+The polishing of the Latin tongue, in the succession of times, made
+the only difference; and Horace himself in two of his satires,
+written purposely on this subject, thinks the Romans of his age were
+too partial in their commendations of Lucilius, who writ not only
+loosely and muddily, with little art and much less care, but also in
+a time when the Latin tongue was not yet sufficiently purged from
+the dregs of barbarism; and many significant and sounding words
+which the Romans wanted were not admitted even in the times of
+Lucretius and Cicero, of which both complain.
+
+But to proceed:  Dacier justly taxes Casaubon for saying that the
+satires of Lucilius were wholly different in species from those of
+Ennius and Pacuvius, Casaubon was led into that mistake by Diomedes
+the grammarian, who in effect says this:- "Satire amongst the Romans
+but not amongst the Greeks, was a biting invective poem, made after
+the model of the ancient comedy, for the reprehension of vices; such
+as were the poems of Lucilius, of Horace, and of Persius.  But in
+former times the name of satire was given to poems which were
+composed of several sorts of verses, such as were made by Ennius and
+Pacuvius"--more fully expressing the etymology of the word satire
+from satura, which we have observed.  Here it is manifest that
+Diomedes makes a specifical distinction betwixt the satires of
+Ennius and those of Lucilius.  But this, as we say in English, is
+only a distinction without a difference; for the reason of it is
+ridiculous and absolutely false.  This was that which cozened honest
+Casaubon, who, relying on Diomedes, had not sufficiently examined
+the origin and nature of those two satires, which were entirely the
+same both in the matter and the form; for all that Lucilius
+performed beyond his predecessors, Ennius and Pacuvius, was only the
+adding of more politeness and more salt, without any change in the
+substance of the poem.  And though Lucilius put not together in the
+same satire several sorts of verses, as Ennius did, yet he composed
+several satires of several sorts of verses, and mingled them with
+Greek verses:  one poem consisted only of hexameters, and another
+was entirely of iambics; a third of trochaics; as is visible by the
+fragments yet remaining of his works.  In short, if the satires of
+Lucilius are therefore said to be wholly different from those of
+Ennius because he added much more of beauty and polishing to his own
+poems than are to be found in those before him, it will follow from
+hence that the satires of Horace are wholly different from those of
+Lucilius, because Horace has not less surpassed Lucilius in the
+elegancy of his writing than Lucilius surpassed Ennius in the turn
+and ornament of his.  This passage of Diomedes has also drawn Dousa
+the son into the same error of Casaubon, which I say, not to expose
+the little failings of those judicious men, but only to make it
+appear with how much diffidence and caution we are to read their
+works when they treat a subject of so much obscurity and so very
+ancient as is this of satire.
+
+Having thus brought down the history of satire from its original to
+the times of Horace, and shown the several changes of it, I should
+here discover some of those graces which Horace added to it, but
+that I think it will be more proper to defer that undertaking till I
+make the comparison betwixt him and Juvenal.  In the meanwhile,
+following the order of time, it will be necessary to say somewhat of
+another kind of satire which also was descended from the ancient; it
+is that which we call the Varronian satire (but which Varro himself
+calls the Menippean) because Varro, the most learned of the Romans,
+was the first author of it, who imitated in his works the manners of
+Menippus the Gadarenian, who professed the philosophy of the Cynics.
+
+This sort of satire was not only composed of several sorts of verse,
+like those of Ennius, but was also mixed with prose, and Greek was
+sprinkled amongst the Latin.  Quintilian, after he had spoken of the
+satire of Lucilius, adds what follows:- "There is another and former
+kind of satire, composed by Terentius Varro, the most learned of the
+Romans, in which he was not satisfied alone with mingling in it
+several sorts of verse."  The only difficulty of this passage is
+that Quintilian tells us that this satire of Varro was of a former
+kind; for how can we possibly imagine this to be, since Varro, who
+was contemporary to Cicero, must consequently be after Lucilius?
+But Quintilian meant not that the satire of Varro was in order of
+time before Lucilius; he would only give us to understand that the
+Varronian satire, with mixture of several sorts of verses, was more
+after the manner of Ennius and Pacuvius than that of Lucilius, who
+was more severe and more correct, and gave himself less liberty in
+the mixture of his verses in the same poem.
+
+We have nothing remaining of those Varronian satires excepting some
+inconsiderable fragments, and those for the most part much
+corrupted.  The tithes of many of them are indeed preserved, and
+they are generally double; from whence, at least, we may understand
+how many various subjects were treated by that author.  Tully in his
+"Academics" introduces Varro himself giving us some light concerning
+the scope and design of those works; wherein, after he had shown his
+reasons why he did not ex professo write of philosophy, he adds what
+follows:- "Notwithstanding," says he, "that those pieces of mine
+wherein I have imitated Menippus, though I have not translated him,
+are sprinkled with a kind of mirth and gaiety, yet many things are
+there inserted which are drawn from the very entrails of philosophy,
+and many things severely argued which I have mingled with
+pleasantries on purpose that they may more easily go down with the
+common sort of unlearned readers."  The rest of the sentence is so
+lame that we can only make thus much out of it--that in the
+composition of his satires he so tempered philology with philosophy
+that his work was a mixture of them both.  And Tully himself
+confirms us in this opinion when a little after he addresses himself
+to Varro in these words:- "And you yourself have composed a most
+elegant and complete poem; you have begun philosophy in many places;
+sufficient to incite us, though too little to instruct us."  Thus it
+appears that Varro was one of those writers whom they called [Greek
+text which cannot be reproduced] (studious of laughter); and that,
+as learned as he was, his business was more to divert his reader
+than to teach him.  And he entitled his own satires Menippean; not
+that Menippus had written any satires (for his were either dialogues
+or epistles), but that Varro imitated his style, his manner, and his
+facetiousness.  All that we know further of Menippus and his
+writings, which are wholly lost, is that by some he is esteemed, as,
+amongst the rest, by Varro; by others he is noted of cynical
+impudence and obscenity; that he was much given to those parodies
+which I have already mentioned (that is, he often quoted the verses
+of Homer and the tragic poets, and turned their serious meaning into
+something that was ridiculous); whereas Varro's satires are by Tully
+called absolute, and most elegant and various poems.  Lucian, who
+was emulous of this Menippus, seems to have imitated both his
+manners and his style in many of his dialogues, where Menippus
+himself is often introduced as a speaker in them and as a perpetual
+buffoon; particularly his character is expressed in the beginning of
+that dialogue which is called [Greek text which cannot be
+reproduced].  But Varro in imitating him avoids his impudence and
+filthiness, and only expresses his witty pleasantry.
+
+This we may believe for certain--that as his subjects were various,
+so most of them were tales or stories of his own invention; which is
+also manifest from antiquity by those authors who are acknowledged
+to have written Varronian satires in imitation of his--of whom the
+chief is Petronius Arbiter, whose satire, they say, is now printing
+in Holland, wholly recovered, and made complete; when it is made
+public, it will easily be seen by any one sentence whether it be
+supposititious or genuine.  Many of Lucian's dialogues may also
+properly be called Varronian satires, particularly his true history;
+and consequently the "Golden Ass" of Apuleius, which is taken from
+him.  Of the same stamp is the mock deification of Claudius by
+Seneca, and the Symposium or "Caesars" of Julian the Emperor.
+Amongst the moderns we may reckon the "Encomium Moriae" of Erasmus,
+Barclay's "Euphormio," and a volume of German authors which my
+ingenious friend Mr. Charles Killigrew once lent me.  In the English
+I remember none which are mixed with prose as Varro's were; but of
+the same kind is "Mother Hubbard's Tale" in Spenser, and (if it be
+not too vain to mention anything of my own) the poems of "Absalom"
+and "MacFlecnoe."
+
+This is what I have to say in general of satire:  only, as Dacier
+has observed before me, we may take notice that the word satire is
+of a more general signification in Latin than in French or English;
+for amongst the Romans it was not only used for those discourses
+which decried vice or exposed folly, but for others also, where
+virtue was recommended.  But in our modern languages we apply it
+only to invective poems, where the very name of satire is formidable
+to those persons who would appear to the world what they are not in
+themselves; for in English, to say satire is to mean reflection, as
+we use that word in the worst sense; or as the French call it, more
+properly, medisance.  In the criticism of spelling, it ought to be
+with i, and not with y, to distinguish its true derivation from
+satura, not from Satyrus; and if this be so, then it is false
+spelled throughout this book, for here it is written "satyr," which
+having not considered at the first, I thought it not worth
+correcting afterwards.  But the French are more nice, and never
+spell it any otherwise than "satire."
+
+I am now arrived at the most difficult part of my undertaking, which
+is to compare Horace with Juvenal and Persius.  It is observed by
+Rigaltius in his preface before Juvenal, written to Thuanus, that
+these three poets have all their particular partisans and favourers.
+Every commentator, as he has taken pains with any of them, thinks
+himself obliged to prefer his author to the other two; to find out
+their failings, and decry them, that he may make room for his own
+darling.  Such is the partiality of mankind, to set up that interest
+which they have once espoused, though it be to the prejudice of
+truth, morality, and common justice, and especially in the
+productions of the brain.  As authors generally think themselves the
+best poets, because they cannot go out of themselves to judge
+sincerely of their betters, so it is with critics, who, having first
+taken a liking to one of these poets, proceed to comment on him and
+to illustrate him; after which they fall in love with their own
+labours to that degree of blind fondness that at length they defend
+and exalt their author, not so much for his sake as for their own.
+It is a folly of the same nature with that of the Romans themselves
+in their games of the circus.  The spectators were divided in their
+factions betwixt the Veneti and the Prasini; some were for the
+charioteer in blue, and some for him in green.  The colours
+themselves were but a fancy; but when once a man had taken pains to
+set out those of his party, and had been at the trouble of procuring
+voices for them, the case was altered:  he was concerned for his own
+labour, and that so earnestly that disputes and quarrels,
+animosities, commotions, and bloodshed often happened; and in the
+declension of the Grecian empire, the very sovereigns themselves
+engaged in it, even when the barbarians were at their doors, and
+stickled for the preference of colours when the safety of their
+people was in question.  I am now myself on the brink of the same
+precipice; I have spent some time on the translation of Juvenal and
+Persius, and it behoves me to be wary, lest for that reason I should
+be partial to them, or take a prejudice against Horace.  Yet on the
+other side I would not be like some of our judges, who would give
+the cause for a poor man right or wrong; for though that be an error
+on the better hand, yet it is still a partiality, and a rich man
+unheard cannot be concluded an oppressor.  I remember a saying of
+King Charles II. on Sir Matthew Hale (who was doubtless an uncorrupt
+and upright man), that his servants were sure to be cast on any
+trial which was heard before him; not that he thought the judge was
+possibly to be bribed, but that his integrity might be too
+scrupulous, and that the causes of the Crown were always suspicious
+when the privileges of subjects were concerned.
+
+It had been much fairer if the modern critics who have embarked in
+the quarrels of their favourite authors had rather given to each his
+proper due without taking from another's heap to raise their own.
+There is praise enough for each of them in particular, without
+encroaching on his fellows, and detracting from them or enriching
+themselves with the spoils of others.  But to come to particulars:
+Heinsius and Dacier are the most principal of those who raise Horace
+above Juvenal and Persius.  Scaliger the father, Rigaltius, and many
+others debase Horace that they may set up Juvenal; and Casaubon, who
+is almost single, throws dirt on Juvenal and Horace that he may
+exalt Persius, whom he understood particularly well, and better than
+any of his former commentators, even Stelluti, who succeeded him.  I
+will begin with him who, in my opinion, defends the weakest cause,
+which is that of Persius; and labouring, as Tacitus professes of his
+own writing, to divest myself of partiality or prejudice, consider
+Persius, not as a poet whom I have wholly translated, and who has
+cost me more labour and time than Juvenal, but according to what I
+judge to be his own merit, which I think not equal in the main to
+that of Juvenal or Horace, and yet in some things to be preferred to
+both of them.
+
+First, then, for the verse; neither Casaubon himself, nor any for
+him, can defend either his numbers or the purity of his Latin.
+Casaubon gives this point for lost, and pretends not to justify
+either the measures or the words of Persius; he is evidently beneath
+Horace and Juvenal in both.
+
+Then, as his verse is scabrous and hobbling, and his words not
+everywhere well chosen (the purity of Latin being more corrupted
+than in the time of Juvenal, and consequently of Horace, who wrote
+when the language was in the height of its perfection), so his
+diction is hard, his figures are generally too bold and daring, and
+his tropes, particularly his metaphors, insufferably strained.
+
+In the third place, notwithstanding all the diligence of Casaubon,
+Stelluti, and a Scotch gentleman whom I have heard extremely
+commended for his illustrations of him, yet he is still obscure;
+whether he affected not to be understood but with difficulty; or
+whether the fear of his safety under Nero compelled him to this
+darkness in some places, or that it was occasioned by his close way
+of thinking, and the brevity of his style and crowding of his
+figures; or lastly, whether after so long a time many of his words
+have been corrupted, and many customs and stories relating to them
+lost to us; whether some of these reasons, or all, concurred to
+render him so cloudy, we may be bold to affirm that the best of
+commentators can but guess at his meaning in many passages, and none
+can be certain that he has divined rightly.
+
+After all he was a young man, like his friend and contemporary
+Lucan--both of them men of extraordinary parts and great acquired
+knowledge, considering their youth; but neither of them had arrived
+to that maturity of judgment which is necessary to the accomplishing
+of a formed poet.  And this consideration, as on the one hand it
+lays some imperfections to their charge, so on the other side it is
+a candid excuse for those failings which are incident to youth and
+inexperience; and we have more reason to wonder how they, who died
+before the thirtieth year of their age, could write so well and
+think so strongly, than to accuse them of those faults from which
+human nature (and more especially in youth) can never possibly be
+exempted.
+
+To consider Persius yet more closely:  he rather insulted over vice
+and folly than exposed them like Juvenal and Horace; and as chaste
+and modest as he is esteemed, it cannot be denied but that in some
+places he is broad and fulsome, as the latter verses of the fourth
+satire and of the sixth sufficiently witness.  And it is to be
+believed that he who commits the same crime often and without
+necessity cannot but do it with some kind of pleasure.
+
+To come to a conclusion:  he is manifestly below Horace because he
+borrows most of his greatest beauties from him; and Casaubon is so
+far from denying this that he has written a treatise purposely
+concerning it, wherein he shows a multitude of his translations from
+Horace, and his imitations of him, for the credit of his author,
+which he calls "Imitatio Horatiana."
+
+To these defects (which I casually observed while I was translating
+this author) Scaliger has added others; he calls him in plain terms
+a silly writer and a trifler, full of ostentation of his learning,
+and, after all, unworthy to come into competition with Juvenal and
+Horace.
+
+After such terrible accusations, it is time to hear what his patron
+Casaubon can allege in his defence.  Instead of answering, he
+excuses for the most part; and when he cannot, accuses others of the
+same crimes.  He deals with Scaliger as a modest scholar with a
+master.  He compliments him with so much reverence that one would
+swear he feared him as much at least as he respected him.  Scaliger
+will not allow Persius to have any wit; Casaubon interprets this in
+the mildest sense, and confesses his author was not good at turning
+things into a pleasant ridicule, or, in other words, that he was not
+a laughable writer.  That he was ineptus, indeed, but that was non
+aptissimus ad jocandum; but that he was ostentatious of his
+learning, that by Scaliger's good favour he denies.  Persius showed
+his learning, but was no boaster of it; he did ostendere, but not
+ostentare; and so, he says, did Scaliger (where, methinks, Casaubon
+turns it handsomely upon that supercilious critic, and silently
+insinuates that he himself was sufficiently vain-glorious and a
+boaster of his own knowledge).  All the writings of this venerable
+censor, continues Casaubon, which are [Greek text which cannot be
+reproduced] (more golden than gold itself), are everywhere smelling
+of that thyme which, like a bee, he has gathered from ancient
+authors; but far be ostentation and vain-glory from a gentleman so
+well born and so nobly educated as Scaliger.  But, says Scaliger, he
+is so obscure that he has got himself the name of Scotinus--a dark
+writer.  "Now," says Casaubon, "it is a wonder to me that anything
+could be obscure to the divine wit of Scaliger, from which nothing
+could be hidden."  This is, indeed, a strong compliment, but no
+defence; and Casaubon, who could not but be sensible of his author's
+blind side, thinks it time to abandon a post that was untenable.  He
+acknowledges that Persius is obscure in some places; but so is
+Plato, so is Thucydides; so are Pindar, Theocritus, and Aristophanes
+amongst the Greek poets; and even Horace and Juvenal, he might have
+added, amongst the Romans.  The truth is, Persius is not sometimes,
+but generally obscure; and therefore Casaubon at last is forced to
+excuse him by alleging that it was se defendendo, for fear of Nero,
+and that he was commanded to write so cloudily by Cornutus, in
+virtue of holy obedience to his master.  I cannot help my own
+opinion; I think Cornutus needed not to have read many lectures to
+him on that subject.  Persius was an apt scholar, and when he was
+bidden to be obscure in some places where his life and safety were
+in question, took the same counsel for all his book, and never
+afterwards wrote ten lines together clearly.  Casaubon, being upon
+this chapter, has not failed, we may be sure, of making a compliment
+to his own dear comment.  "If Persius," says he, "be in himself
+obscure, yet my interpretation has made him intelligible."  There is
+no question but he deserves that praise which he has given to
+himself; but the nature of the thing, as Lucretius says, will not
+admit of a perfect explanation.  Besides many examples which I could
+urge, the very last verse of his last satire (upon which he
+particularly values himself in his preface) is not yet sufficiently
+explicated.  It is true, Holyday has endeavoured to justify his
+construction; but Stelluti is against it:  and, for my part, I can
+have but a very dark notion of it.  As for the chastity of his
+thoughts, Casaubon denies not but that one particular passage in the
+fourth satire (At, si unctus cesses, &c.) is not only the most
+obscure, but the most obscene, of all his works.  I understood it,
+but for that reason turned it over.  In defence of his boisterous
+metaphors he quotes Longinus, who accounts them as instruments of
+the sublime, fit to move and stir up the affections, particularly in
+narration; to which it may be replied that where the trope is far-
+fetched and hard, it is fit for nothing but to puzzle the
+understanding, and may be reckoned amongst those things of
+Demosthenes which AEschines called [Greek text which cannot be
+reproduced] not [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]--that is,
+prodigies, not words.  It must be granted to Casaubon that the
+knowledge of many things is lost in our modern ages which were of
+familiar notice to the ancients, and that satire is a poem of a
+difficult nature in itself, and is not written to vulgar readers;
+and (through the relation which it has to comedy) the frequent
+change of persons makes the sense perplexed, when we can but divine
+who it is that speaks--whether Persius himself, or his friend and
+monitor, or, in some places, a third person.  But Casaubon comes
+back always to himself, and concludes that if Persius had not been
+obscure, there had been no need of him for an interpreter.  Yet when
+he had once enjoined himself so hard a task, he then considered the
+Greek proverb, that he must [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]
+(either eat the whole snail or let it quite alone); and so he went
+through with his laborious task, as I have done with my difficult
+translation.
+
+Thus far, my lord, you see it has gone very hard with Persius.  I
+think he cannot be allowed to stand in competition either with
+Juvenal or Horace.  Yet, for once, I will venture to be so vain as
+to affirm that none of his hard metaphors or forced expressions are
+in my translation.  But more of this in its proper place, where I
+shall say somewhat in particular of our general performance in
+making these two authors English.  In the meantime I think myself
+obliged to give Persius his undoubted due, and to acquaint the
+world, with Casaubon, in what he has equalled and in what excelled
+his two competitors.
+
+A man who is resolved to praise an author with any appearance of
+justice must be sure to take him on the strongest side, and where he
+is least liable to exceptions; he is therefore obliged to choose his
+mediums accordingly.  Casaubon (who saw that Persius could not laugh
+with a becoming grace, that he was not made for jesting, and that a
+merry conceit was not his talent) turned his feather, like an
+Indian, to another light, that he might give it the better gloss.
+"Moral doctrine," says he, "and urbanity or well-mannered wit are
+the two things which constitute the Roman satire; but of the two,
+that which is most essential to this poem, and is, as it were, the
+very soul which animates it, is the scourging of vice and
+exhortation to virtue."  Thus wit, for a good reason, is already
+almost out of doors, and allowed only for an instrument--a kind of
+tool or a weapon, as he calls it--of which the satirist makes use in
+the compassing of his design.  The end and aim of our three rivals
+is consequently the same; but by what methods they have prosecuted
+their intention is further to be considered.  Satire is of the
+nature of moral philosophy, as being instructive; he therefore who
+instructs most usefully will carry the palm from his two
+antagonists.  The philosophy in which Persius was educated, and
+which he professes through his whole book, is the Stoic--the most
+noble, most generous, most beneficial to humankind amongst all the
+sects who have given us the rules of ethics, thereby to form a
+severe virtue in the soul, to raise in us an undaunted courage
+against the assaults of fortune, to esteem as nothing the things
+that are without us, because they are not in our power; not to value
+riches, beauty, honours, fame, or health any farther than as
+conveniences and so many helps to living as we ought, and doing good
+in our generation.  In short, to be always happy while we possess
+our minds with a good conscience, are free from the slavery of
+vices, and conform our actions and conversation to the rules of
+right reason.  See here, my lord, an epitome of Epictetus, the
+doctrine of Zeno, and the education of our Persius; and this he
+expressed, not only in all his satires, but in the manner of his
+life.  I will not lessen this commendation of the Stoic philosophy
+by giving you an account of some absurdities in their doctrine, and
+some perhaps impieties (if we consider them by the standard of
+Christian faith).  Persius has fallen into none of them, and
+therefore is free from those imputations.  What he teaches might be
+taught from pulpits with more profit to the audience than all the
+nice speculations of divinity and controversies concerning faith,
+which are more for the profit of the shepherd than for the
+edification of the flock.  Passion, interest, ambition, and all
+their bloody consequences of discord and of war are banished from
+this doctrine.  Here is nothing proposed but the quiet and
+tranquillity of the mind; virtue lodged at home, and afterwards
+diffused in her general effects to the improvement and good of
+humankind.  And therefore I wonder not that the present Bishop of
+Salisbury has recommended this our author and the tenth satire of
+Juvenal (in his pastoral letter) to the serious perusal and practice
+of the divines in his diocese as the best commonplaces for their
+sermons, as the storehouses and magazines of moral virtues, from
+whence they may draw out, as they have occasion, all manner of
+assistance for the accomplishment of a virtuous life, which the
+Stoics have assigned for the great end and perfection of mankind.
+Herein, then, it is that Persius has excelled both Juvenal and
+Horace.  He sticks to his own philosophy; he shifts not sides, like
+Horace (who is sometimes an Epicurean, sometimes a Stoic, sometimes
+an Eclectic, as his present humour leads him), nor declaims, like
+Juvenal, against vices more like an orator than a philosopher.
+Persius is everywhere the same--true to the dogmas of his master.
+What he has learnt, he teaches vehemently; and what he teaches, that
+he practises himself.  There is a spirit of sincerity in all he
+says; you may easily discern that he is in earnest, and is persuaded
+of that truth which he inculcates.  In this I am of opinion that he
+excels Horace, who is commonly in jest, and laughs while he
+instructs; and is equal to Juvenal, who was as honest and serious as
+Persius, and more he could not be.
+
+Hitherto I have followed Casaubon, and enlarged upon him, because I
+am satisfied that he says no more than truth; the rest is almost all
+frivolous.  For he says that Horace, being the son of a tax-gatherer
+(or a collector, as we call it) smells everywhere of the meanness of
+his birth and education; his conceits are vulgar, like the subjects
+of his satires; that he does plebeium sepere, and writes not with
+that elevation which becomes a satirist; that Persius, being nobly
+born and of an opulent family, had likewise the advantage of a
+better master (Cornutus being the most learned of his time, a man of
+a most holy life, the chief of the Stoic sect at Rome, and not only
+a great philosopher, but a poet himself, and in probability a
+coadjutor of Persius:  that as for Juvenal, he was long a declaimer,
+came late to poetry, and had not been much conversant in philosophy.
+
+It is granted that the father of Horace was libertinus--that is, one
+degree removed from his grandfather, who had been once a slave.  But
+Horace, speaking of him, gives him the best character of a father
+which I ever read in history; and I wish a witty friend of mine, now
+living, had such another.  He bred him in the best school, and with
+the best company of young noblemen; and Horace, by his gratitude to
+his memory, gives a certain testimony that his education was
+ingenuous.  After this he formed himself abroad by the conversation
+of great men.  Brutus found him at Athens, and was so pleased with
+him that he took him thence into the army, and made him Tribunus
+Militum (a colonel in a legion), which was the preferment of an old
+soldier.  All this was before his acquaintance with Maecenas, and
+his introduction into the court of Augustus, and the familiarity of
+that great emperor; which, had he not been well bred before, had
+been enough to civilise his conversation, and render him
+accomplished and knowing in all the arts of complacency and good
+behaviour; and, in short, an agreeable companion for the retired
+hours and privacies of a favourite who was first minister.  So that
+upon the whole matter Persius may be acknowledged to be equal with
+him in those respects, though better born, and Juvenal inferior to
+both.  If the advantage be anywhere, it is on the side of Horace, as
+much as the court of Augustus Caesar was superior to that of Nero.
+As for the subjects which they treated, it will appear hereafter
+that Horace wrote not vulgarly on vulgar subjects, nor always chose
+them.  His style is constantly accommodated to his subject, either
+high or low.  If his fault be too much lowness, that of Persius is
+the fault of the hardness of his metaphors and obscurity; and so
+they are equal in the failings of their style, where Juvenal
+manifestly triumphs over both of them.
+
+The comparison betwixt Horace and Juvenal is more difficult, because
+their forces were more equal.  A dispute has always been, and ever
+will continue, betwixt the favourers of the two poets.  Non nostrum
+est tantas componere lites.  I shall only venture to give my own
+opinion, and leave it for better judges to determine.  If it be only
+argued in general which of them was the better poet, the victory is
+already gained on the side of Horace.  Virgil himself must yield to
+him in the delicacy of his turns, his choice of words, and perhaps
+the purity of his Latin.  He who says that Pindar is inimitable, is
+himself inimitable in his odes; but the contention betwixt these two
+great masters is for the prize of satire, in which controversy all
+the odes and epodes of Horace are to stand excluded.  I say this
+because Horace has written many of them satirically against his
+private enemies; yet these, if justly considered, are somewhat of
+the nature of the Greek silli, which were invectives against
+particular sects and persons.  But Horace had purged himself of this
+choler before he entered on those discourses which are more properly
+called the Roman satire.  He has not now to do with a Lyce, a
+Canidia, a Cassius Severus, or a Menas; but is to correct the vices
+and the follies of his time, and to give the rules of a happy and
+virtuous life.  In a word, that former sort of satire which is known
+in England by the name of lampoon is a dangerous sort of weapon, and
+for the most part unlawful.  We have no moral right on the
+reputation of other men; it is taking from them what we cannot
+restore to them.  There are only two reasons for which we may be
+permitted to write lampoons, and I will not promise that they can
+always justify us.  The first is revenge, when we have been
+affronted in the same nature, or have been anywise notoriously
+abused, and can make ourselves no other reparation.  And yet we know
+that in Christian charity all offences are to be forgiven, as we
+expect the like pardon for those which we daily commit against
+Almighty God.  And this consideration has often made me tremble when
+I was saying our Saviour's prayer, for the plain condition of the
+forgiveness which we beg is the pardoning of others the offences
+which they have done to us; for which reason I have many times
+avoided the commission of that fault, even when I have been
+notoriously provoked.  Let not this, my lord, pass for vanity in me;
+for it is truth.  More libels have been written against me than
+almost any man now living; and I had reason on my side to have
+defended my own innocence.  I speak not of my poetry, which I have
+wholly given up to the critics--let them use it as they please--
+posterity, perhaps, may be more favourable to me; for interest and
+passion will lie buried in another age, and partiality and prejudice
+be forgotten.  I speak of my morals, which have been sufficiently
+aspersed--that only sort of reputation ought to be dear to every
+honest man, and is to me.  But let the world witness for me that I
+have been often wanting to myself in that particular; I have seldom
+answered any scurrilous lampoon when it was in my power to have
+exposed my enemies; and, being naturally vindicative, have suffered
+in silence, and possessed my soul in quiet.
+
+Anything, though never so little, which a man speaks of himself, in
+my opinion, is still too much; and therefore I will waive this
+subject, and proceed to give the second reason which may justify a
+poet when he writes against a particular person, and that is when he
+is become a public nuisance.  All those whom Horace in his satires,
+and Persius and Juvenal have mentioned in theirs with a brand of
+infamy, are wholly such.  It is an action of virtue to make examples
+of vicious men.  They may and ought to be upbraided with their
+crimes and follies, both for their own amendment (if they are not
+yet incorrigible), and for the terror of others, to hinder them from
+falling into those enormities, which they see are so severely
+punished in the persons of others.  The first reason was only an
+excuse for revenge; but this second is absolutely of a poet's office
+to perform.  But how few lampooners are there now living who are
+capable of this duty!  When they come in my way, it is impossible
+sometimes to avoid reading them.  But, good God! how remote they are
+in common justice from the choice of such persons as are the proper
+subject of satire, and how little wit they bring for the support of
+their injustice!  The weaker sex is their most ordinary theme; and
+the best and fairest are sure to be the most severely handled.
+Amongst men, those who are prosperously unjust are entitled to a
+panegyric, but afflicted virtue is insolently stabbed with all
+manner of reproaches; no decency is considered, no fulsomeness
+omitted; no venom is wanting, as far as dulness can supply it, for
+there is a perpetual dearth of wit, a barrenness of good sense and
+entertainment.  The neglect of the readers will soon put an end to
+this sort of scribbling.  There can be no pleasantry where there is
+no wit, no impression can be made where there is no truth for the
+foundation.  To conclude:  they are like the fruits of the earth in
+this unnatural season; the corn which held up its head is spoiled
+with rankness, but the greater part of the harvest is laid along,
+and little of good income and wholesome nourishment is received into
+the barns.  This is almost a digression, I confess to your lordship;
+but a just indignation forced it from me.  Now I have removed this
+rubbish I will return to the comparison of Juvenal and Horace.
+
+I would willingly divide the palm betwixt them upon the two heads of
+profit and delight, which are the two ends of poetry in general.  It
+must be granted by the favourers of Juvenal that Horace is the more
+copious and more profitable in his instructions of human life; but
+in my particular opinion, which I set not up for a standard to
+better judgments, Juvenal is the more delightful author.  I am
+profited by both, I am pleased with both; but I owe more to Horace
+for my instruction, and more to Juvenal for my pleasure.  This, as I
+said, is my particular taste of these two authors.  They who will
+have either of them to excel the other in both qualities, can scarce
+give better reasons for their opinion than I for mine.  But all
+unbiassed readers will conclude that my moderation is not to be
+condemned; to such impartial men I must appeal, for they who have
+already formed their judgment may justly stand suspected of
+prejudice; and though all who are my readers will set up to be my
+judges, I enter my caveat against them, that they ought not so much
+as to be of my jury; or; if they be admitted, it is but reason that
+they should first hear what I have to urge in the defence of my
+opinion.
+
+That Horace is somewhat the better instructor of the two is proved
+from hence--that his instructions are more general, Juvenal's more
+limited.  So that, granting that the counsels which they give are
+equally good for moral use, Horace, who gives the most various
+advice, and most applicable to all occasions which can occur to us
+in the course of our lives--as including in his discourses not only
+all the rules of morality, but also of civil conversation--is
+undoubtedly to be preferred to him, who is more circumscribed in his
+instructions, makes them to fewer people, and on fewer occasions,
+than the other.  I may be pardoned for using an old saying, since it
+is true and to the purpose:  Bonum quo communius, eo melius.
+Juvenal, excepting only his first satire, is in all the rest
+confined to the exposing of some particular vice; that he lashes,
+and there he sticks.  His sentences are truly shining and
+instructive; but they are sprinkled here and there.  Horace is
+teaching us in every line, and is perpetually moral; he had found
+out the skill of Virgil to hide his sentences, to give you the
+virtue of them without showing them in their full extent, which is
+the ostentation of a poet, and not his art.  And this Petronius
+charges on the authors of his time as a vice of writing, which was
+then growing on the age:  ne sententiae extra corpus orationis
+emineant; he would have them weaved into the body of the work, and
+not appear embossed upon it, and striking directly on the reader's
+view.  Folly was the proper quarry of Horace, and not vice; and as
+there are but few notoriously wicked men in comparison with a shoal
+of fools and fops, so it is a harder thing to make a man wise than
+to make him honest; for the will is only to be reclaimed in the one,
+but the understanding is to be informed in the other.  There are
+blind sides and follies even in the professors of moral philosophy,
+and there is not any one sect of them that Horace has not exposed;
+which, as it was not the design of Juvenal, who was wholly employed
+in lashing vices (some of them the most enormous that can be
+imagined), so perhaps it was not so much his talent.
+
+
+"Omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico
+Tangit, et admissus circum praecordia ludit."
+
+
+This was the commendation which Persius gave him; where by vitium he
+means those little vices which we call follies, the defects of human
+understanding, or at most the peccadilloes of life, rather than the
+tragical vices to which men are hurried by their unruly passions and
+exorbitant desires.  But in the word omne, which is universal, he
+concludes with me that the divine wit of Horace left nothing
+untouched; that he entered into the inmost recesses of nature; found
+out the imperfections even of the most wise and grave, as well as of
+the common people; discovering even in the great Trebatius (to whom
+he addresses the first satire) his hunting after business and
+following the court, as well as in the prosecutor Crispinus, his
+impertinence and importunity.  It is true, he exposes Crispinus
+openly as a common nuisance; but he rallies the other, as a friend,
+more finely.  The exhortations of Persius are confined to noblemen,
+and the Stoic philosophy is that alone which he recommends to them;
+Juvenal exhorts to particular virtues, as they are opposed to those
+vices against which he declaims; but Horace laughs to shame all
+follies, and insinuates virtue rather by familiar examples than by
+the severity of precepts.
+
+This last consideration seems to incline the balance on the side of
+Horace, and to give him the preference to Juvenal, not only in
+profit, but in pleasure.  But, after all, I must confess that the
+delight which Horace gives me is but languishing (be pleased still
+to understand that I speak of my own taste only); he may ravish
+other men, but I am too stupid and insensible to be tickled.  Where
+he barely grins himself, and, as Scaliger says, only shows his white
+teeth, he cannot provoke me to any laughter.  His urbanity--that is,
+his good manners--are to be commended; but his wit is faint, and his
+salt (if I may dare to say so) almost insipid.  Juvenal is of a more
+vigorous and masculine wit; he gives me as much pleasure as I can
+bear; he fully satisfies my expectation; he treats his subject home;
+his spleen is raised, and he raises mine.  I have the pleasure of
+concernment in all he says; he drives his reader along with him, and
+when he is at the end of his way, I willingly stop with him.  If he
+went another stage, it would be too far; it would make a journey of
+a progress, and turn delight into fatigue.  When he gives over, it
+is a sign the subject is exhausted, and the wit of man can carry it
+no farther.  If a fault can be justly found in him, it is that he is
+sometimes too luxuriant, too redundant; says more than he needs,
+like my friend "the Plain Dealer," but never more than pleases.  Add
+to this that his thoughts are as just as those of Horace, and much
+more elevated; his expressions are sonorous and more noble; his
+verse more numerous; and his words are suitable to his thoughts,
+sublime and lofty.  All these contribute to the pleasure of the
+reader; and the greater the soul of him who reads, his transports
+are the greater.  Horace is always on the amble, Juvenal on the
+gallop, but his way is perpetually on carpet-ground.  He goes with
+more impetuosity than Horace, but as securely; and the swiftness
+adds a more lively agitation to the spirits.  The low style of
+Horace is according to his subject--that is, generally grovelling.
+I question not but he could have raised it, for the first epistle of
+the second book, which he writes to Augustus (a most instructive
+satire concerning poetry), is of so much dignity in the words, and
+of so much elegancy in the numbers, that the author plainly shows
+the sermo pedestris in his other satires was rather his choice than
+his necessity.  He was a rival to Lucilius, his predecessor, and was
+resolved to surpass him in his own manner.  Lucilius, as we see by
+his remaining fragments, minded neither his style, nor his numbers,
+nor his purity of words, nor his run of verse.  Horace therefore
+copes with him in that humble way of satire, writes under his own
+force, and carries a dead weight, that he may match his competitor
+in the race.  This, I imagine, was the chief reason why he minded
+only the clearness of his satire, and the cleanness of expression,
+without ascending to those heights to which his own vigour might
+have carried him.  But limiting his desires only to the conquest of
+Lucilius, he had his ends of his rival, who lived before him, but
+made way for a new conquest over himself by Juvenal his successor.
+He could not give an equal pleasure to his reader, because he used
+not equal instruments.  The fault was in the tools, and not in the
+workman.  But versification and numbers are the greatest pleasures
+of poetry.  Virgil knew it, and practised both so happily that, for
+aught I know, his greatest excellency is in his diction.  In all
+other parts of poetry he is faultless, but in this he placed his
+chief perfection.  And give me leave, my lord, since I have here an
+apt occasion, to say that Virgil could have written sharper satires
+than either Horace or Juvenal if he would have employed his talent
+that way.  I will produce a verse and half of his, in one of his
+Eclogues, to justify my opinion, and with commas after every word,
+to show that he has given almost as many lashes as he has written
+syllables.  It is against a bad poet, whose ill verses he describes
+
+
+"Non tu, in triviis indocte, solebas
+Stridenti, miserum, stipula, disperdere carmen?"
+
+
+But to return to my purpose.  When there is anything deficient in
+numbers and sound, the reader is uneasy and unsatisfied; he wants
+something of his complement, desires somewhat which he finds not:
+and this being the manifest defect of Horace, it is no wonder that,
+finding it supplied in Juvenal, we are more delighted with him.  And
+besides this, the sauce of Juvenal is more poignant, to create in us
+an appetite of reading him.  The meat of Horace is more nourishing,
+but the cookery of Juvenal more exquisite; so that, granting Horace
+to be the more general philosopher, we cannot deny that Juvenal was
+the greater poet--I mean, in satire.  His thoughts are sharper, his
+indignation against vice is more vehement, his spirit has more of
+the commonwealth genius; he treats tyranny, and all the vices
+attending it, as they deserve, with the utmost rigour; and
+consequently a noble soul is better pleased with a zealous
+vindicator of Roman liberty than with a temporising poet, a well-
+mannered court slave, and a man who is often afraid of laughing in
+the right place--who is ever decent, because he is naturally
+servile.
+
+After all, Horace had the disadvantage of the times in which he
+lived; they were better for the man, but worse for the satirist.  It
+is generally said that those enormous vices which were practised
+under the reign of Domitian were unknown in the time of Augustus
+Caesar; that therefore Juvenal had a larger field than Horace.
+Little follies were out of doors when oppression was to be scourged
+instead of avarice; it was no longer time to turn into ridicule the
+false opinions of philosophers when the Roman liberty was to be
+asserted.  There was more need of a Brutus in Domitian's days to
+redeem or mend, than of a Horace, if he had then been living, to
+laugh at a fly-catcher.  This reflection at the same time excuses
+Horace, but exalts Juvenal.  I have ended, before I was aware, the
+comparison of Horace and Juvenal upon the topics of instruction and
+delight; and indeed I may safely here conclude that commonplace:
+for if we make Horace our minister of state in satire, and Juvenal
+of our private pleasures, I think the latter has no ill bargain of
+it.  Let profit have the pre-eminence of honour in the end of
+poetry; pleasure, though but the second in degree, is the first in
+favour.  And who would not choose to be loved better rather than to
+be more esteemed!  But I am entered already upon another topic,
+which concerns the particular merits of these two satirists.
+However, I will pursue my business where I left it, and carry it
+farther than that common observation of the several ages in which
+these authors flourished.
+
+When Horace writ his satires, the monarchy of his Caesar was in its
+newness, and the government but just made easy to the conquered
+people.  They could not possibly have forgotten the usurpation of
+that prince upon their freedom, nor the violent methods which he had
+used in the compassing of that vast design; they yet remembered his
+proscriptions, and the slaughter of so many noble Romans their
+defenders--amongst the rest, that horrible action of his when he
+forced Livia from the arms of her husband (who was constrained to
+see her married, as Dion relates the story), and, big with child as
+she was, conveyed to the bed of his insulting rival.  The same Dion
+Cassius gives us another instance of the crime before mentioned--
+that Cornelius Sisenna, being reproached in full senate with the
+licentious conduct of his wife, returned this answer:  that he had
+married her by the counsel of Augustus (intimating, says my author,
+that Augustus had obliged him to that marriage, that he might under
+that covert have the more free access to her).  His adulteries were
+still before their eyes, but they must be patient where they had not
+power.  In other things that emperor was moderate enough; propriety
+was generally secured, and the people entertained with public shows
+and donatives, to make them more easily digest their lost liberty.
+But Augustus, who was conscious to himself of so many crimes which
+he had committed, thought in the first place to provide for his own
+reputation by making an edict against lampoons and satires, and the
+authors of those defamatory writings, which my author Tacitus, from
+the law-term, calls famosos libellos.
+
+In the first book of his Annals he gives the following account of it
+in these words:- Primus Augustus cognitionem de famosis libellis,
+specie legis ejus, tractavit; commotus Cassii Severi libidine, qua
+viros faeminasque illustres procacibus scriptis diffamaverat.  Thus
+in English:- "Augustus was the first who, under the colour of that
+law, took cognisance of lampoons, being provoked to it by the
+petulancy of Cassius Severus, who had defamed many illustrious
+persons of both sexes in his writings."  The law to which Tacitus
+refers was Lex laesae majestatis; commonly called, for the sake of
+brevity, majestas; or, as we say, high-treason.  He means not that
+this law had not been enacted formerly (for it had been made by the
+Decemviri, and was inscribed amongst the rest in the Twelve Tables,
+to prevent the aspersion of the Roman majesty, either of the people
+themselves, or their religion, or their magistrates; and the
+infringement of it was capital--that is, the offender was whipped to
+death with the fasces which were borne before their chief officers
+of Rome), but Augustus was the first who restored that intermitted
+law.  By the words "under colour of that law" he insinuates that
+Augustus caused it to be executed on pretence of those libels which
+were written by Cassius Severus against the nobility, but in truth
+to save himself from such defamatory verses.  Suetonius likewise
+makes mention of it thus:- Sparsos de se in curia famosos libellos,
+nec exparit, et magna cura redarguit.  Ac ne requisitis quidem
+auctoribus, id modo censuit, cognoscendum posthac de iis qui
+libellos aut carmina ad infamiam cujuspiam sub alieno nomine edant.
+"Augustus was not afraid of libels," says that author, "yet he took
+all care imaginable to have them answered, and then decreed that for
+the time to come the authors of them should be punished."  But
+Aurelius makes it yet more clear, according to my sense, that this
+emperor for his own sake durst not permit them:- Fecit id Augustus
+in speciem, et quasi gratificaretur populo Romano, et primoribus
+urbis; sed revera ut sibi consuleret:  nam habuit in animo
+comprimere nimiam quorundam procacitatem in loquendo, a qua nec ipse
+exemptus fuit.  Nam suo nomine compescere erat invidiosum, sub
+alieno facile et utile.  Ergo specie legis tractavit, quasi populi
+Romani majestas infamaretur.  This, I think, is a sufficient comment
+on that passage of Tacitus.  I will add only by the way that the
+whole family of the Caesars and all their relations were included in
+the law, because the majesty of the Romans in the time of the Empire
+was wholly in that house:  Omnia Caesar erat; they were all
+accounted sacred who belonged to him.  As for Cassius Severus, he
+was contemporary with Horace, and was the same poet against whom he
+writes in his epodes under this title, In Cassium Severum, maledicum
+poctam--perhaps intending to kill two crows, according to our
+proverb, with one stone, and revenge both himself and his emperor
+together.
+
+From hence I may reasonably conclude that Augustus, who was not
+altogether so good as he was wise, had some by-respect in the
+enacting of this law; for to do anything for nothing was not his
+maxim.  Horace, as he was a courtier, complied with the interest of
+his master; and, avoiding the lashing of greater crimes, confined
+himself to the ridiculing of petty vices and common follies,
+excepting only some reserved cases in his odes and epodes of his own
+particular quarrels (which either with permission of the magistrate
+or without it, every man will revenge, though I say not that he
+should; for prior laesit is a good excuse in the civil law if
+Christianity had not taught us to forgive).  However, he was not the
+proper man to arraign great vices; at least, if the stories which we
+hear of him are true--that he practised some which I will not here
+mention, out of honour to him.  It was not for a Clodius to accuse
+adulterers, especially when Augustus was of that number.  So that,
+though his age was not exempted from the worst of villainies, there
+was no freedom left to reprehend them by reason of the edict; and
+our poet was not fit to represent them in an odious character,
+because himself was dipped in the same actions.  Upon this account,
+without further insisting on the different tempers of Juvenal and
+Horace, I conclude that the subjects which Horace chose for satire
+are of a lower nature than those of which Juvenal has written.
+
+Thus I have treated, in a new method, the comparison betwixt Horace,
+Juvenal, and Persius.  Somewhat of their particular manner,
+belonging to all of them, is yet remaining to be considered.
+Persius was grave, and particularly opposed his gravity to lewdness,
+which was the predominant vice in Nero's court at the time when he
+published his satires, which was before that emperor fell into the
+excess of cruelty.  Horace was a mild admonisher, a court satirist,
+fit for the gentle times of Augustus, and more fit for the reasons
+which I have already given.  Juvenal was as proper for his times as
+they for theirs; his was an age that deserved a more severe
+chastisement; vices were more gross and open, more flagitious, more
+encouraged by the example of a tyrant, and more protected by his
+authority.  Therefore, wheresoever Juvenal mentions Nero, he means
+Domitian, whom he dares not attack in his own person, but scourges
+him by proxy.  Heinsius urges in praise of Horace that, according to
+the ancient art and law of satire, it should be nearer to comedy
+than to tragedy; not declaiming against vice, but only laughing at
+it.  Neither Persius nor Juvenal was ignorant of this, for they had
+both studied Horace.  And the thing itself is plainly true.  But as
+they had read Horace, they had likewise read Lucilius, of whom
+Persius says, Secuit urbem; . . . et genuinum fregit in illis;
+meaning Mutius and Lupus; and Juvenal also mentions him in these
+words
+
+
+"Ense velut stricto, quoties Lucilius ardens
+Infremuit, rubet auditor, cui frigida mens est
+Criminibus, tacita sulant praecordia culpa."
+
+
+So that they thought the imitation of Lucilius was more proper to
+their purpose than that of Horace.  "They changed satire," says
+Holyday, "but they changed it for the better; for the business being
+to reform great vices, chastisement goes farther than admonition;
+whereas a perpetual grin, like that of Horace, does rather anger
+than amend a man."
+
+Thus far that learned critic Barten Holyday, whose interpretation
+and illustrations of Juvenal are as excellent as the verse of his
+translation and his English are lame and pitiful; for it is not
+enough to give us the meaning of a poet (which I acknowledge him to
+have performed most faithfully) but he must also imitate his genius
+and his numbers as far as the English will come up to the elegance
+of the original.  In few words, it is only for a poet to translate a
+poet.  Holyday and Stapleton had not enough considered this when
+they attempted Juvenal; but I forbear reflections:  only I beg leave
+to take notice of this sentence, where Holyday says, "a perpetual
+grin, like that of Horace, rather angers than amends a man."  I
+cannot give him up the manner of Horace in low satire so easily.
+Let the chastisements of Juvenal be never so necessary for his new
+kind of satire, let him declaim as wittily and sharply as he
+pleases, yet still the nicest and most delicate touches of satire
+consist in fine raillery.  This, my lord, is your particular talent,
+to which even Juvenal could not arrive.  It is not reading, it is
+not imitation of, an author which can produce this fineness; it must
+be inborn; it must proceed from a genius, and particular way of
+thinking, which is not to be taught, and therefore not to be
+imitated by him who has it not from nature.  How easy it is to call
+rogue and villain, and that wittily! but how hard to make a man
+appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of those
+opprobrious terms!  To spare the grossness of the names, and to do
+the thing yet more severely, is to draw a full face and to make the
+nose and cheeks stand out, and yet not to employ any depth of
+shadowing.  This is the mystery of that noble trade, which yet no
+master can teach to his apprentice; he may give the rules, but the
+scholar is never the nearer in his practice.  Neither is it true
+that this fineness of raillery is offensive; a witty man is tickled,
+while he is hurt in this manner; and a fool feels it not.  The
+occasion of an offence may possibly be given, but he cannot take it.
+If it be granted that in effect this way does more mischief; that a
+man is secretly wounded, and though he be not sensible himself, yet
+the malicious world will find it for him; yet there is still a vast
+difference betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man, and the
+fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body and
+leaves it standing in its place.  A man may be capable, as Jack
+Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain piece of work, a bare
+hanging; but to make a malefactor die sweetly was only belonging to
+her husband.  I wish I could apply it to myself, if the reader would
+be kind enough to think it belongs to me.  The character of Zimri,
+in my "Absalom" is, in my opinion, worth the whole poem; it is not
+bloody, but it is ridiculous enough; and he for whom it was intended
+was too witty to resent it as an injury.  If I had railed, I might
+have suffered for it justly; but I managed my own work more happily,
+perhaps more dexterously.  I avoided the mention of great crimes,
+and applied myself to the representing of blind-sides and little
+extravagances; to which the wittier a man is, he is generally the
+more obnoxious.  It succeeded as I wished; the jest went round, and
+he was laughed at in his turn who began the frolic.
+
+And thus, my lord, you see I have preferred the manner of Horace and
+of your lordship in this kind of satire to that of Juvenal, and, I
+think, reasonably.  Holyday ought not to have arraigned so great an
+author for that which was his excellency and his merit; or, if he
+did, on such a palpable mistake he might expect that some one might
+possibly arise (either in his own time, or after him) to rectify his
+error, and restore to Horace that commendation of which he has so
+unjustly robbed him.  And let the manes of Juvenal forgive me if I
+say that this way of Horace was the best for amending manners, as it
+is the most difficult.  His was an ense rescindendum; but that of
+Horace was a pleasant cure, with all the limbs preserved entire,
+and, as our mountebanks tell us in their bills, without keeping the
+patient within doors for a day.  What they promise only, Horace has
+effectually performed.  Yet I contradict not the proposition which I
+formerly advanced.  Juvenal's times required a more painful kind of
+operation; but if he had lived in the age of Horace, I must needs
+affirm that he had it not about him.  He took the method which was
+prescribed him by his own genius, which was sharp and eager; he
+could not railly, but he could declaim:  and as his provocations
+were great, he has revenged them tragically.  This, notwithstanding
+I am to say another word which, as true as it is, will yet displease
+the partial admirers of our Horace; I have hinted it before, but it
+is time for me now to speak more plainly.
+
+This manner of Horace is indeed the best; but Horace has not
+executed it altogether so happily--at least, not often.  The manner
+of Juvenal is confessed to be inferior to the former; but Juvenal
+has excelled him in his performance.  Juvenal has railed more
+wittily than Horace has rallied.  Horace means to make his reader
+laugh, but he is not sure of his experiment.  Juvenal always intends
+to move your indignation, and he always brings about his purpose.
+Horace, for aught I know, might have tickled the people of his age,
+but amongst the moderns he is not so successful.  They who say he
+entertains so pleasantly, may perhaps value themselves on the
+quickness of their own understandings, that they can see a jest
+farther off than other men; they may find occasion of laughter in
+the wit-battle of the two buffoons Sarmentus and Cicerrus, and hold
+their sides for fear of bursting when Rupilius and Persius are
+scolding.  For my own part, I can only like the characters of all
+four, which are judiciously given; but for my heart I cannot so much
+as smile at their insipid raillery.  I see not why Persius should
+call upon Brutus to revenge him on his adversary; and that because
+he had killed Julius Caesar for endeavouring to be a king, therefore
+he should be desired to murder Rupilius, only because his name was
+Mr. King.  A miserable clench, in my opinion, for Horace to record;
+I have heard honest Mr. Swan make many a better, and yet have had
+the grace to hold my countenance.  But it may be puns were then in
+fashion, as they were wit in the sermons of the last age, and in the
+court of King Charles the Second.  I am sorry to say it, for the
+sake of Horace; but certain it is, he has no fine palate who can
+feed so heartily on garbage.
+
+But I have already wearied myself, and doubt not but I have tired
+your lordship's patience, with this long, rambling, and, I fear,
+trivial discourse.  Upon the one-half of the merits, that is,
+pleasure, I cannot but conclude that Juvenal was the better
+satirist.  They who will descend into his particular praises may
+find them at large in the dissertation of the learned Rigaltius to
+Thuanus.  As for Persius, I have given the reasons why I think him
+inferior to both of them; yet I have one thing to add on that
+subject.
+
+Barten Holyday, who translated both Juvenal and Persius, has made
+this distinction betwixt them, which is no less true than witty--
+that in Persius, the difficulty is to find a meaning; in Juvenal, to
+choose a meaning; so crabbed is Persius, and so copious is Juvenal;
+so much the understanding is employed in one, and so much the
+judgment in the other; so difficult is it to find any sense in the
+former, and the best sense of the latter.
+
+If, on the other side, any one suppose I have commended Horace below
+his merit, when I have allowed him but the second place, I desire
+him to consider if Juvenal (a man of excellent natural endowments,
+besides the advantages of diligence and study, and coming after him
+and building upon his foundations) might not probably, with all
+these helps, surpass him; and whether it be any dishonour to Horace
+to be thus surpassed, since no art or science is at once begun and
+perfected but that it must pass first through many hands and even
+through several ages.  If Lucilius could add to Ennius and Horace to
+Lucilius, why, without any diminution to the fame of Horace, might
+not Juvenal give the last perfection to that work?  Or rather, what
+disreputation is it to Horace that Juvenal excels in the tragical
+satire, as Horace does in the comical?  I have read over attentively
+both Heinsius and Dacier in their commendations of Horace, but I can
+find no more in either of them for the preference of him to Juvenal
+than the instructive part (the part of wisdom, and not that of
+pleasure), which therefore is here allowed him, notwithstanding what
+Scaliger and Rigaltius have pleaded to the contrary for Juvenal.
+And to show I am impartial I will here translate what Dacier has
+said on that subject:-
+
+"I cannot give a more just idea of the two books of satires made by
+Horace than by comparing them to the statues of the Sileni, to which
+Alcibiades compares Socrates in the Symposium.  They were figures
+which had nothing of agreeable, nothing of beauty on their outside;
+but when any one took the pains to open them and search into them,
+he there found the figures of all the deities.  So in the shape that
+Horace presents himself to us in his satires we see nothing at the
+first view which deserves our attention; it seems that he is rather
+an amusement for children than for the serious consideration of men.
+But when we take away his crust, and that which hides him from our
+sight, when we discover him to the bottom, then we find all the
+divinities in a full assembly--that is to say, all the virtues which
+ought to be the continual exercise of those who seriously endeavour
+to correct their vices."
+
+It is easy to observe that Dacier, in this noble similitude, has
+confined the praise of his author wholly to the instructive part the
+commendation turns on this, and so does that which follows:-
+
+"In these two books of satire it is the business of Horace to
+instruct us how to combat our vices, to regulate our passions, to
+follow nature, to give bounds to our desires, to distinguish betwixt
+truth and falsehood, and betwixt our conceptions of things and
+things themselves; to come back from our prejudicate opinions, to
+understand exactly the principles and motives of all our actions;
+and to avoid the ridicule into which all men necessarily fall who
+are intoxicated with those notions which they have received from
+their masters, and which they obstinately retain without examining
+whether or no they be founded on right reason.
+
+"In a word, he labours to render us happy in relation to ourselves;
+agreeable and faithful to our friends; and discreet, serviceable,
+and well-bred in relation to those with whom we are obliged to live
+and to converse.  To make his figures intelligible, to conduct his
+readers through the labyrinth of some perplexed sentence or obscure
+parenthesis, is no great matter; and, as Epictetus says, there is
+nothing of beauty in all this, or what is worthy of a prudent man.
+The principal business, and which is of most importance to us, is to
+show the use, the reason, and the proof of his precepts.
+
+"They who endeavour not to correct themselves according to so exact
+a model are just like the patients who have open before them a book
+of admirable receipts for their diseases, and please themselves with
+reading it without comprehending the nature of the remedies or how
+to apply them to their cure."
+
+Let Horace go off with these encomiums, which he has so well
+deserved.
+
+To conclude the contention betwixt our three poets I will use the
+words of Virgil in his fifth AEneid, where AEneas proposes the
+rewards of the foot-race to the three first who should reach the
+goal:-
+
+
+"Tres praemia primi . . .
+Accipient, flauaque caput nectentur oliva."
+
+
+Let these three ancients be preferred to all the moderns as first
+arriving at the goal; let them all be crowned as victors with the
+wreath that properly belongs to satire.  But after that, with this
+distinction amongst themselves:-
+
+
+"Primus equum phaleris insignem victor habeto."
+
+
+Let Juvenal ride first in triumph.
+
+
+"Alter Amazoniam pharetram, plenamque sagittis
+Threiciis, lato quam circumplectitur auro
+Balteus, et tereti subnectit fibula gemma."
+
+
+Let Horace, who is the second (and but just the second), carry off
+the quiver and the arrows as the badges of his satire, and the
+golden belt and the diamond button.
+
+
+"Tertius Argolico hoc clypeo contentus abito."
+
+
+And let Persius, the last of the first three worthies, be contented
+with this Grecian shield, and with victory--not only over all the
+Grecians, who were ignorant of the Roman satire--but over all the
+moderns in succeeding ages, excepting Boileau and your lordship.
+
+And thus I have given the history of satire, and derived it as far
+as from Ennius to your lordship--that is, from its first rudiments
+of barbarity to its last polishing and perfection; which is, with
+Virgil, in his address to Augustus -
+
+
+"Nomen fama tot ferre per annos, . . .
+Tithoni prima quot abest ab origine Caesar."
+
+
+I said only from Ennius, but I may safely carry it higher, as far as
+Livius Andronicus, who, as I have said formerly, taught the first
+play at Rome in the year ab urbe condita CCCCCXIV.  I have since
+desired my learned friend Mr. Maidwell to compute the difference of
+times betwixt Aristophanes and Livius Andronicus; and he assures me
+from the best chronologers that Plutus, the last of Aristophanes'
+plays, was represented at Athens in the year of the 97th Olympiad,
+which agrees with the year urbis conditae CCCLXIV.  So that the
+difference of years betwixt Aristophanes and Andronicus is 150; from
+whence I have probably deduced that Livius Andronicus, who was a
+Grecian, had read the plays of the old comedy, which were satirical,
+and also of the new; for Menander was fifty years before him, which
+must needs be a great light to him in his own plays that were of the
+satirical nature.  That the Romans had farces before this, it is
+true; but then they had no communication with Greece; so that
+Andronicus was the first who wrote after the manner of the old
+comedy, in his plays:  he was imitated by Ennius about thirty years
+afterwards.  Though the former writ fables, the latter, speaking
+properly, began the Roman satire, according to that description
+which Juvenal gives of it in his first:-
+
+
+"Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira voluptas,
+Gaudia, discurses, nostri est farrago libelli."
+
+
+This is that in which I have made hold to differ from Casaubon,
+Rigaltius, Dacier, and indeed from all the modern critics--that not
+Ennius, but Andronicus, was the first who, by the archaea comedia of
+the Greeks, added many beauties to the first rude and barbarous
+Roman satire; which sort of poem, though we had not derived from
+Rome, yet nature teaches it mankind in all ages and in every
+country.
+
+It is but necessary that, after so much has been said of satire,
+some definition of it should be given.  Heinsius, in his
+Dissertations on Horace, makes it for me in these words:- "Satire is
+a kind of poetry, without a series of action, invented for the
+purging of our minds; in which human vices, ignorance, and errors,
+and all things besides which are produced from them in every man,
+are severely reprehended--partly dramatically, partly simply, and
+sometimes in both kinds of speaking, but for the most part
+figuratively and occultly; consisting, in a low familiar way,
+chiefly in a sharp and pungent manner of speech, but partly also in
+a facetious and civil way of jesting, by which either hatred or
+laughter or indignation is moved."  Where I cannot but observe that
+this obscure and perplexed definition, or rather description of
+satire, is wholly accommodated to the Horatian way, and excluding
+the works of Juvenal and Persius as foreign from that kind of poem.
+The clause in the beginning of it, "without a series of action,"
+distinguishes satire properly from stage-plays, which are all of one
+action and one continued series of action.  The end or scope of
+satire is to purge the passions; so far it is common to the satires
+of Juvenal and Persius.  The rest which follows is also generally
+belonging to all three, till he comes upon us with the excluding
+clause, "consisting, in a low familiar way of speech" which is the
+proper character of Horace, and from which the other two (for their
+honour be it spoken) are far distant.  But how come lowness of style
+and the familiarity of words to be so much the propriety of satire
+that without them a poet can be no more a satirist than without
+risibility he can be a man?  Is the fault of Horace to be made the
+virtue and standing rule of this poem?  Is the grande sophos of
+Persius, and the sublimity of Juvenal, to be circumscribed with the
+meanness of words and vulgarity of expression?  If Horace refused
+the pains of numbers and the loftiness of figures are they bound to
+follow so ill a precedent?  Let him walk afoot with his pad in his
+hand for his own pleasure, but let not them be accounted no poets
+who choose to mount and show their horsemanship.  Holyday is not
+afraid to say that there was never such a fall as from his odes to
+his satires, and that he, injuriously to himself, untuned his harp.
+The majestic way of Persius and Juvenal was new when they began it,
+but it is old to us; and what poems have not, with time, received an
+alteration in their fashion?--"which alteration," says Holyday, "is
+to after-times as good a warrant as the first."  Has not Virgil
+changed the manners of Homer's heroes in his AEneis?  Certainly he
+has, and for the better; for Virgil's age was more civilised and
+better bred, and he writ according to the politeness of Rome under
+the reign of Augustus Caesar, not to the rudeness of Agamemnon's age
+or the times of Homer.  Why should we offer to confine free spirits
+to one form when we cannot so much as confine our bodies to one
+fashion of apparel?  Would not Donne's satires, which abound with so
+much wit, appear more charming if he had taken care of his words and
+of his numbers?  But he followed Horace so very close that of
+necessity he must fall with him; and I may safely say it of this
+present age, that if we are not so great wits as Donne, yet
+certainly we are better poets.
+
+But I have said enough, and it may be too much, on this subject.
+Will your lordship be pleased to prolong my audience only so far
+till I tell you my own trivial thoughts how a modern satire should
+be made?  I will not deviate in the least from the precepts and
+examples of the ancients, who were always our best masters; I will
+only illustrate them, and discover some of the hidden beauties in
+their designs, that we thereby may form our own in imitation of
+them.  Will you please but to observe that Persius, the least in
+dignity of all the three, has, notwithstanding, been the first who
+has discovered to us this important secret in the designing of a
+perfect satire--that it ought only to treat of one subject; to be
+confined to one particular theme, or, at least, to one principally?
+If other vices occur in the management of the chief, they should
+only be transiently lashed, and not be insisted on, so as to make
+the design double.  As in a play of the English fashion which we
+call a tragicomedy, there is to be but one main design, and though
+there be an under-plot or second walk of comical characters and
+adventures, yet they are subservient to the chief fable, carried
+along under it and helping to it, so that the drama may not seem a
+monster with two heads.  Thus the Copernican system of the planets
+makes the moon to be moved by the motion of the earth, and carried
+about her orb as a dependent of hers.  Mascardi, in his discourse of
+the "Doppia Favola," or double tale in plays, gives an instance of
+it in the famous pastoral of Guarini, called Il Pastor Fido, where
+Corisca and the Satyr are the under-parts; yet we may observe that
+Corisca is brought into the body of the plot and made subservient to
+it.  It is certain that the divine wit of Horace was not ignorant of
+this rule--that a play, though it consists of many parts, must yet
+be one in the action, and must drive on the accomplishment of one
+design--for he gives this very precept, Sit quod vis simplex
+duntaxat, et unum; yet he seems not much to mind it in his satires,
+many of them consisting of more arguments than one, and the second
+without dependence on the first.  Casaubon has observed this before
+me in his preference of Persius to Horace, and will have his own
+beloved author to be the first who found out and introduced this
+method of confining himself to one subject.
+
+I know it may be urged in defence of Horace that this unity is not
+necessary, because the very word satura signifies a dish plentifully
+stored with all variety of fruits and grains.  Yet Juvenal, who
+calls his poems a farrago (which is a word of the same signification
+with satura), has chosen to follow the same method of Persius and
+not of Horace; and Boileau, whose example alone is a sufficient
+authority, has wholly confined himself in all his satires to this
+unity of design.  That variety which is not to be found in any one
+satire is at least in many, written on several occasions; and if
+variety be of absolute necessity in every one of them, according to
+the etymology of the word, yet it may arise naturally from one
+subject, as it is diversely treated in the several subordinate
+branches of it, all relating to the chief.  It may be illustrated
+accordingly with variety of examples in the subdivisions of it, and
+with as many precepts as there are members of it, which all together
+may complete that olla or hotch-potch which is properly a satire.
+
+Under this unity of theme or subject is comprehended another rule
+for perfecting the design of true satire.  The poet is bound, and
+that ex officio, to give his reader some one precept of moral
+virtue, and to caution him against some one particular vice or
+folly.  Other virtues, subordinate to the first, may be recommended
+under that chief head, and other vices or follies may be scourged,
+besides that which he principally intends; but he is chiefly to
+inculcate one virtue, and insist on that.  Thus Juvenal, in every
+satire excepting the first, ties himself to one principal
+instructive point, or to the shunning of moral evil.  Even in the
+sixth, which seems only an arraignment of the whole sex of
+womankind, there is a latent admonition to avoid ill women, by
+showing how very few who are virtuous and good are to be found
+amongst them.  But this, though the wittiest of all his satires, has
+yet the least of truth or instruction in it; he has run himself into
+his old declamatory way, and almost forgotten that he was now
+setting up for a moral poet.
+
+Persius is never wanting to us in some profitable doctrine, and in
+exposing the opposite vices to it.  His kind of philosophy is one,
+which is the Stoic, and every satire is a comment on one particular
+dogma of that sect, unless we will except the first, which is
+against bad writers; and yet even there he forgets not the precepts
+of the "porch."  In general, all virtues are everywhere to be
+praised and recommended to practice, and all vices to be reprehended
+and made either odious or ridiculous, or else there is a fundamental
+error in the whole design.
+
+I have already declared who are the only persons that are the
+adequate object of private satire, and who they are that may
+properly be exposed by name for public examples of vices and
+follies, and therefore I will trouble your lordship no further with
+them.  Of the best and finest manner of satire, I have said enough
+in the comparison betwixt Juvenal and Horace; it is that sharp well-
+mannered way of laughing a folly out of countenance, of which your
+lordship is the best master in this age.  I will proceed to the
+versification which is most proper for it, and add somewhat to what
+I have said already on that subject.  The sort of verse which is
+called "burlesque," consisting of eight syllables or four feet, is
+that which our excellent Hudibras has chosen.  I ought to have
+mentioned him before when I spoke of Donne, but by a slip of an old
+man's memory he was forgotten.  The worth of his poem is too well
+known to need my commendation, and he is above my censure.  His
+satire is of the Varronian kind, though unmixed with prose.  The
+choice of his numbers is suitable enough to his design as he has
+managed it; but in any other hand the shortness of his verse, and
+the quick returns of rhyme, had debased the dignity of style.  And
+besides, the double rhyme (a necessary companion of burlesque
+writing) is not so proper for manly satire, for it turns earnest too
+much to jest, and gives us a boyish kind of pleasure.  It tickles
+awkwardly, with a kind of pain to the best sort of readers; we are
+pleased ungratefully, and, if I may say so, against our liking.  We
+thank him not for giving us that unseasonable delight, when we know
+he could have given us a better and more solid.  He might have left
+that task to others who, not being able to put in thought, can only
+makes us grin with the excrescence of a word of two or three
+syllables in the close.  It is, indeed, below so great a master to
+make use of such a little instrument.  But his good sense is
+perpetually shining through all he writes; it affords us not the
+time of finding faults:  we pass through the levity of his rhyme,
+and are immediately carried into some admirable useful thought.
+After all, he has chosen this kind of verse, and has written the
+best in it, and had he taken another he would always have excelled;
+as we say of a court favourite, that whatsoever his office be, he
+still makes it uppermost and most beneficial to himself.
+
+The quickness of your imagination, my lord, has already prevented
+me; and you know beforehand that I would prefer the verse of ten
+syllables, which we call the English heroic, to that of eight.  This
+is truly my opinion, for this sort of number is more roomy; the
+thought can turn itself with greater ease in a larger compass.  When
+the rhyme comes too thick upon us, it straitens the expression; we
+are thinking of the close when we should be employed in adorning the
+thought.  It makes a poet giddy with turning in a space too narrow
+for his imagination; he loses many beauties without gaining one
+advantage.  For a burlesque rhyme I have already concluded to be
+none; or, if it were, it is more easily purchased in ten syllables
+than in eight.  In both occasions it is as in a tennis-court, when
+the strokes of greater force are given, when we strike out and play
+at length.  Tassoni and Boileau have left us the best examples of
+this way in the "Seechia Rapita" and the "Lutrin," and next them
+Merlin Cocaius in his "Baldus."  I will speak only of the two
+former, because the last is written in Latin verse.  The "Secchia
+Rapita" is an Italian poem, a satire of the Varronian kind.  It is
+written in the stanza of eight, which is their measure for heroic
+verse.  The words are stately, the numbers smooth; the turn both of
+thoughts and words is happy.  The first six lines of the stanza seem
+majestical and severe, but the two last turn them all into a
+pleasant ridicule.  Boileau, if I am not much deceived, has modelled
+from hence his famous "Lutrin."  He had read the burlesque poetry of
+Scarron with some kind of indignation, as witty as it was, and found
+nothing in France that was worthy of his imitation; but he copied
+the Italian so well that his own may pass for an original.  He
+writes it in the French heroic verse, and calls it an heroic poem;
+his subject is trivial, but his verse is noble.  I doubt not but he
+had Virgil in his eye, for we find many admirable imitations of him,
+and some parodies, as particularly this passage in the fourth of the
+AEneids -
+
+
+"Nec tibi diva parens, generis nec Dardanus auctor,
+Perfide; sed duris genuit te cautibus horrens
+Caucasus, Hyrrcanaeque admorunt ubera tigres:"
+
+
+which he thus translates, keeping to the words, but altering the
+sense:-
+
+
+"Non, ton pere a Paris, ne fut point boulanger:
+Et tu n'es point du sang de Gervais, l'horloger;
+Ta mere ne fut point la maitresse d'un coche;
+Caucase dans ses flancs te forma d'une roche;
+Une tigresse affreuse, en quelque antre ecarte,
+Te fit, avec son lait, succer sa cruaute."
+
+
+And as Virgil in his fourth Georgic of the bees, perpetually raises
+the lowness of his subject by the loftiness of his words, and
+ennobles it by comparisons drawn from empires and from monarchs -
+
+
+"Admiranda tibi levium spectacula rerum,
+Magnanimosque duces, totiusque ordine gentis
+Mores et studia, et populos, et praelia dicam;"
+
+
+and again -
+
+
+"At genus immortale manet, multosque per annos
+Stat fortuna domus, et avi numerantur avorum;"
+
+
+we see Boileau pursuing him in the same flights, and scarcely
+yielding to his master.  This I think, my lord, to be the most
+beautiful and most noble kind of satire.  Here is the majesty of the
+heroic finely mixed with the venom of the other, and raising the
+delight, which otherwise would be flat and vulgar, by the sublimity
+of the expression.  I could say somewhat more of the delicacy of
+this and some other of his satires, but it might turn to his
+prejudice if it were carried back to France.
+
+I have given your lordship but this bare hint--in what verse and in
+what manner this sort of satire may be best managed.  Had I time I
+could enlarge on the beautiful turns of words and thoughts which are
+as requisite in this as in heroic poetry itself, of which the satire
+is undoubtedly a species.  With these beautiful turns I confess
+myself to have been unacquainted till about twenty years ago.  In a
+conversation which I had with that noble wit of Scotland, Sir George
+Mackenzie, he asked me why I did not imitate in my verses the turns
+of Mr. Waller and Sir John Denham, of which he repeated many to me.
+I had often read with pleasure, and with some profit, those two
+fathers of our English poetry, but had not seriously enough
+considered those beauties which give the last perfection to their
+works.  Some sprinklings of this kind I had also formerly in my
+plays; but they were casual, and not designed.  But this hint, thus
+seasonably given me, first made me sensible of my own wants, and
+brought me afterwards to seek for the supply of them in other
+English authors.  I looked over the darling of my youth, the famous
+Cowley; there I found, instead of them, the points of wit and quirks
+of epigram, even in the "Davideis" (an heroic poem which is of an
+opposite nature to those puerilities), but no elegant turns, either
+on the word or on the thought.  Then I consulted a greater genius
+(without offence to the manes of that noble author)--I mean Milton;
+but as he endeavours everywhere to express Homer, whose age had not
+arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true sublimity, lofty
+thoughts which were clothed with admirable Grecisms and ancient
+words, which he had been digging from the minds of Chaucer and
+Spenser, and which, with all their rusticity, had somewhat of
+venerable in them.  But I found not there neither that for which I
+looked.  At last I had recourse to his master, Spenser, the author
+of that immortal poem called the "Faerie Queen," and there I met
+with that which I had been looking for so long in vain.  Spenser had
+studied Virgil to as much advantage as Milton had done Homer, and
+amongst the rest of his excellences had copied that.  Looking
+farther into the Italian, I found Tasso had done the same; nay,
+more, that all the sonnets in that language are on the turn of the
+first thought--which Mr. Walsh, in his late ingenious preface to his
+poems, has observed.  In short, Virgil and Ovid are the two
+principal fountains of them in Latin poetry.  And the French at this
+day are so fond of them that they judge them to be the first
+beauties; delicate, et bien tourne, are the highest commendations
+which they bestow on somewhat which they think a masterpiece.
+
+An example of the turn of words, amongst a thousand others, is that
+in the last book of Ovid's "Metamorphoses":-
+
+
+"Heu! quantum scelus est, in viscera, viscera condi!
+Congestoque avidum pinguescere corpore corpus;
+Alteriusque animantem animantis vivere leto."
+
+
+An example on the turn both of thoughts and words is to be found in
+Catullus in the complaint of Ariadne when she was left by Theseus:-
+
+
+"Tum jam nulla viro juranti faemina credat;
+Nulla viri speret sermones esse fideles;
+Qui, dum aliquid cupiens animus praegestit apisci,
+Nil metuunt jurare, nihil promittere parcunt:
+Sed simul ac cupidae mentis satiata libido est,
+Dicta nihil metuere, nihil perjuria curant."
+
+
+An extraordinary turn upon the words is that in Ovid's "Epistolae
+Heroidum" of Sappho to Phaon:-
+
+
+"Si, nisi quae forma poterit te digna videri,
+Nulla futura tua est, nulla futura tua est."
+
+
+Lastly a turn, which I cannot say is absolutely on words--for the
+thought turns with them--is in the fourth Georgic of Virgil, where
+Orpheus is to receive his wife from hell on express condition not to
+look on her till she was come on earth:-
+
+
+"Cum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem;
+Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes."
+
+
+I will not burthen your lordship with more of them, for I write to a
+master who understands them better than myself; but I may safely
+conclude them to be great beauties.  I might descend also to the
+mechanic beauties of heroic verse; but we have yet no English
+Prosodia, not so much as a tolerable dictionary or a grammar (so
+that our language is in a manner barbarous); and what Government
+will encourage any one, or more, who are capable of refining it, I
+know not:  but nothing under a public expense can go through with
+it.  And I rather fear a declination of the language than hope an
+advancement of it in the present age.
+
+I am still speaking to you, my lord, though in all probability you
+are already out of hearing.  Nothing which my meanness can produce
+is worthy of this long attention.  But I am come to the last
+petition of Abraham:  if there be ten righteous lines in this vast
+preface, spare it for their sake; and also spare the next city,
+because it is but a little one.
+
+I would excuse the performance of this translation if it were all my
+own; but the better, though not the greater, part being the work of
+some gentlemen who have succeeded very happily in their undertaking,
+let their excellences atone for my imperfections and those of my
+sons.  I have perused some of the Satires which are done by other
+hands, and they seem to me as perfect in their kind as anything I
+have seen in English verse.  The common way which we have taken is
+not a literal translation, but a kind of paraphrase; or somewhat
+which is yet more loose, betwixt a paraphrase and imitation.  It was
+not possible for us, or any men, to have made it pleasant any other
+way.  If rendering the exact sense of these authors, almost line for
+line, had been our business, Barten Holyday had done it already to
+our hands; and by the help of his learned notes and illustrations,
+not only Juvenal and Persius, but, what yet is more obscure, his own
+verses might be understood.
+
+But he wrote for fame, and wrote to scholars; we write only for the
+pleasure and entertainment of those gentlemen and ladies who, though
+they are not scholars, are not ignorant--persons of understanding
+and good sense, who, not having been conversant in the original (or,
+at least, not having made Latin verse so much their business as to
+be critics in it), would be glad to find if the wit of our two great
+authors be answerable to their fame and reputation in the world.  We
+have therefore endeavoured to give the public all the satisfaction
+we are able in this kind.
+
+And if we are not altogether so faithful to our author as our
+predecessors Holyday and Stapleton, yet we may challenge to
+ourselves this praise--that we shall be far more pleasing to our
+readers.  We have followed our authors at greater distance, though
+not step by step as they have done; for oftentimes they have gone so
+close that they have trod on the heels of Juvenal and Persius, and
+hurt them by their too near approach.  A noble author would not be
+pursued too close by a translator.  We lose his spirit when we think
+to take his body.  The grosser part remains with us, but the soul is
+flown away in some noble expression, or some delicate turn of words
+or thought.  Thus Holyday, who made this way his choice, seized the
+meaning of Juvenal, but the poetry has always escaped him.
+
+They who will not grant me that pleasure is one of the ends of
+poetry, but that it is only a means of compassing the only end
+(which is instruction), must yet allow that without the means of
+pleasure the instruction is but a bare and dry philosophy, a crude
+preparation of morals which we may have from Aristotle and Epictetus
+with more profit than from any poet.  Neither Holyday nor Stapleton
+have imitated Juvenal in the poetical part of him, his diction, and
+his elocution.  Nor, had they been poets (as neither of them were),
+yet in the way they took, it was impossible for them to have
+succeeded in the poetic part.
+
+The English verse which we call heroic consists of no more than ten
+syllables; the Latin hexameter sometimes rises to seventeen; as, for
+example, this verse in Virgil:-
+
+
+"Pulverulenta putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum."
+
+
+Here is the difference of no less than seven syllables in a line
+betwixt the English and the Latin.  Now the medium of these is about
+fourteen syllables, because the dactyl is a more frequent foot in
+hexameters than the spondee.  But Holyday (without considering that
+he writ with the disadvantage of four syllables less in every verse)
+endeavours to make one of his lines to comprehend the sense of one
+of Juvenal's.  According to the falsity of the proposition was the
+success.  He was forced to crowd his verse with ill-sounding
+monosyllables (of which our barbarous language affords him a wild
+plenty), and by that means he arrived at his pedantic end, which was
+to make a literal translation.  His verses have nothing of verse in
+them, but only the worst part of it--the rhyme; and that, into the
+bargain, is far from good.  But, which is more intolerable, by
+cramming his ill-chosen and worse-sounding monosyllables so close
+together, the very sense which he endeavours to explain is become
+more obscure than that of his author; so that Holyday himself cannot
+be understood without as large a commentary as that which he makes
+on his two authors.  For my own part, I can make a shift to find the
+meaning of Juvenal without his notes, but his translation is more
+difficult than his author.  And I find beauties in the Latin to
+recompense my pains; but in Holyday and Stapleton my ears, in the
+first place, are mortally offended, and then their sense is so
+perplexed that I return to the original as the more pleasing task as
+well as the more easy.
+
+This must be said for our translation--that if we give not the whole
+sense of Juvenal, yet we give the most considerable part of it; we
+give it, in general, so clearly that few notes are sufficient to
+make us intelligible.  We make our author at least appear in a
+poetic dress.  We have actually made him more sounding and more
+elegant than he was before in English, and have endeavoured to make
+him speak that kind of English which he would have spoken had he
+lived in England and had written to this age.  If sometimes any of
+us (and it is but seldom) make him express the customs and manners
+of our native country rather than of Rome, it is either when there
+was some kind of analogy betwixt their customs and ours, or when (to
+make him more easy to vulgar understandings) we gave him those
+manners which are familiar to us.  But I defend not this innovation;
+it is enough if I can excuse it.  For (to speak sincerely) the
+manners of nations and ages are not to be confounded; we should
+either make them English or leave them Roman.  If this can neither
+be defended nor excused, let it be pardoned at least, because it is
+acknowledged; and so much the more easily as being a fault which is
+never committed without some pleasure to the reader.
+
+Thus, my lord, having troubled you with a tedious visit, the best
+manners will be shown in the least ceremony.  I will slip away while
+your back is turned, and while you are otherwise employed; with
+great confusion for having entertained you so long with this
+discourse, and for having no other recompense to make you than the
+worthy labours of my fellow-undertakers in this work, and the
+thankful acknowledgments, prayers, and perpetual good wishes of,
+
+My Lord,
+Your Lordship's
+Most obliged, most humble, and
+Most obedient servant,
+JOHN DRYDEN.
+
+
+
+A DISCOURSE ON EPIC POETRY.
+ADDRESSED TO THE MOST HONOURABLE
+JOHN, LORD MARQUIS OF NORMANBY,
+EARL OF MULGRAVE, ETC., AND KNIGHT OF THE MOST NOBLE ORDER
+OF THE GARTER.
+
+
+
+An heroic poem (truly such) is undoubtedly the greatest work which
+the soul of man is capable to perform.  The design of it is to form
+the mind to heroic virtue by example; it is conveyed in verse that
+it may delight while it instructs.  The action of it is always one,
+entire, and great.  The least and most trivial episodes or under-
+actions which are interwoven in it are parts either necessary or
+convenient to carry on the main design--either so necessary that
+without them the poem must be imperfect, or so convenient that no
+others can be imagined more suitable to the place in which they are.
+There is nothing to be left void in a firm building; even the
+cavities ought not to be filled with rubbish which is of a
+perishable kind--destructive to the strength--but with brick or
+stone (though of less pieces, yet of the same nature), and fitted to
+the crannies.  Even the least portions of them must be of the epic
+kind; all things must be grave, majestical, and sublime; nothing of
+a foreign nature, like the trifling novels which Ariosto and others
+have inserted in their poems, by which the reader is misled into
+another sort of pleasure, opposite to that which is designed in an
+epic poem.  One raises the soul and hardens it to virtue; the other
+softens it again and unbends it into vice.  One conduces to the
+poet's aim (the completing of his work), which he is driving on,
+labouring, and hastening in every line; the other slackens his pace,
+diverts him from his way, and locks him up like a knight-errant in
+an enchanted castle when he should be pursuing his first adventure.
+Statius (as Bossu has well observed) was ambitions of trying his
+strength with his master, Virgil, as Virgil had before tried his
+with Homer.  The Grecian gave the two Romans an example in the games
+which were celebrated at the funerals of Patroclus.  Virgil imitated
+the invention of Homer, but changed the sports.  But both the Greek
+and Latin poet took their occasions from the subject, though (to
+confess the truth) they were both ornamental, or, at best,
+convenient parts of it, rather than of necessity arising from it.
+Statius (who through his whole poem is noted for want of conduct and
+judgment), instead of staying, as he might have done, for the death
+of Capaneus, Hippomedon, Tydeus, or some other of his Seven
+Champions (who are heroes all alike), or more properly for the
+tragical end of the two brothers whose exequies the next successor
+had leisure to perform when the siege was raised, and in the
+interval betwixt the poet's first action and his second, went out of
+his way--as it were, on prepense malice--to commit a fault; for he
+took his opportunity to kill a royal infant by the means of a
+serpent (that author of all evil) to make way for those funeral
+honours which he intended for him.  Now if this innocent had been of
+any relation to his Thebais, if he had either farthered or hindered
+the taking of the town, the poet might have found some sorry excuse
+at least for detaining the reader from the promised siege.  On these
+terms this Capaneus of a poet engaged his two immortal predecessors,
+and his success was answerable to his enterprise.
+
+If this economy must be observed in the minutest parts of an epic
+poem, which to a common reader seem to be detached from the body,
+and almost independent of it, what soul, though sent into the world
+with great advantages of nature, cultivated with the liberal arts
+and sciences, conversant with histories of the dead, and enriched
+with observations on the living, can be sufficient to inform the
+whole body of so great a work?  I touch here but transiently,
+without any strict method, on some few of those many rules of
+imitating nature which Aristotle drew from Homer's "Iliads" and
+"Odysses," and which he fitted to the drama--furnishing himself also
+with observations from the practice of the theatre when it
+flourished under AEschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles (for the
+original of the stage was from the epic poem).  Narration,
+doubtless, preceded acting, and gave laws to it.  What at first was
+told artfully was in process of time represented gracefully to the
+sight and hearing.  Those episodes of Homer which were proper for
+the stage, the poets amplified each into an action.  Out of his
+limbs they formed their bodies; what he had contracted, they
+enlarged; out of one Hercules were made infinity of pigmies, yet all
+endued with human souls; for from him, their great creator, they
+have each of them the divinae particulam aurae.  They flowed from
+him at first, and are at last resolved into him.  Nor were they only
+animated by him, but their measure and symmetry was owing to him.
+His one, entire, and great action was copied by them, according to
+the proportions of the drama.  If he finished his orb within the
+year, it sufficed to teach them that their action being less, and
+being also less diversified with incidents, their orb, of
+consequence, must be circumscribed in a less compass, which they
+reduced within the limits either of a natural or an artificial day.
+So that, as he taught them to amplify what he had shortened, by the
+same rule applied the contrary way he taught them to shorten what he
+had amplified.  Tragedy is the miniature of human life; an epic poem
+is the draft at length.  Here, my lord, I must contract also, for
+before I was aware I was almost running into a long digression to
+prove that there is no such absolute necessity that the time of a
+stage-action should so strictly be confined to twenty-four hours as
+never to exceed them (for which Aristotle contends, and the Grecian
+stage has practised).  Some longer space on some occasions, I think,
+may be allowed, especially for the English theatre, which requires
+more variety of incidents than the French.  Corneille himself, after
+long practice, was inclined to think that the time allotted by the
+ancients was too short to raise and finish a great action; and
+better a mechanic rule were stretched or broken than a great beauty
+were omitted.  To raise, and afterwards to calm, the passions; to
+purge the soul from pride by the examples of human miseries which
+befall the greatest; in few words, to expel arrogance and introduce
+compassion, are the great effects of tragedy--great, I must confess,
+if they were altogether as true as they are pompous.  But are habits
+to be introduced at three hours' warning?  Are radical diseases so
+suddenly removed?  A mountebank may promise such a cure, but a
+skilful physician will not undertake it.  An epic poem is not in so
+much haste; it works leisurely:  the changes which it makes are
+slow, but the cure is likely to be more perfect.  The effects of
+tragedy, as I said, are too violent to be lasting.  If it be
+answered, that for this reason tragedies are often to be seen, and
+the dose to be repeated, this is tacitly to confess that there is
+more virtue in one heroic poem than in many tragedies.  A man is
+humbled one day, and his pride returns the next.  Chemical medicines
+are observed to relieve oftener than to cure; for it is the nature
+of spirits to make swift impressions, but not deep.  Galenical
+decoctions, to which I may properly compare an epic poem, have more
+of body in them; they work by their substance and their weight.
+
+It is one reason of Aristotle's to prove that tragedy is the more
+noble, because it turns in a shorter compass--the whole action being
+circumscribed within the space of four-and-twenty hours.  He might
+prove as well that a mushroom is to be preferred before a peach,
+because it shoots up in the compass of a night.  A chariot may be
+driven round the pillar in less space than a large machine, because
+the bulk is not so great.  Is the moon a more noble planet than
+Saturn, because she makes her revolution in less than thirty days,
+and he in little less than thirty years?  Both their orbs are in
+proportion to their several magnitudes; and consequently the
+quickness or slowness of their motion, and the time of their
+circumvolutions, is no argument of the greater or less perfection.
+And besides, what virtue is there in a tragedy which is not
+contained in an epic poem, where pride is humbled, virtue rewarded,
+and vice punished, and those more amply treated than the narrowness
+of the drama can admit?  The shining quality of an epic hero, his
+magnanimity, his constancy, his patience, his piety, or whatever
+characteristical virtue his poet gives him, raises first our
+admiration; we are naturally prone to imitate what we admire, and
+frequent acts produce a habit.  If the hero's chief quality be
+vicious--as, for example, the choler and obstinate desire of
+vengeance in Achilles--yet the moral is instructive; and besides, we
+are informed in the very proposition of the "Iliads" that this anger
+was pernicious, that it brought a thousand ills on the Grecian camp.
+The courage of Achilles is proposed to imitation, not his pride and
+disobedience to his general; nor his brutal cruelty to his dead
+enemy, nor the selling his body to his father.  We abhor these
+actions while we read them, and what we abhor we never imitate; the
+poet only shows them, like rocks or quicksands to be shunned.
+
+By this example the critics have concluded that it is not necessary
+the manners of the hero should be virtuous (they are poetically good
+if they are of a piece); though where a character of perfect virtue
+is set before us, it is more lovely; for there the whole hero is to
+be imitated.  This is the AEneas of our author; this is that idea of
+perfection in an epic poem which painters and statuaries have only
+in their minds, and which no hands are able to express.  These are
+the beauties of a God in a human body.  When the picture of Achilles
+is drawn in tragedy, he is taken with those warts and moles and hard
+features by those who represent him on the stage, or he is no more
+Achilles; for his creator, Homer, has so described him.  Yet even
+thus he appears a perfect hero, though an imperfect character of
+virtue.  Horace paints him after Homer, and delivers him to be
+copied on the stage with all those imperfections.  Therefore they
+are either not faults in an heroic poem, or faults common to the
+drama.
+
+After all, on the whole merits of the cause, it must be acknowledged
+that the epic poem is more for the manners, and tragedy for the
+passions.  The passions, as I have said, are violent; and acute
+distempers require medicines of a strong and speedy operation.  Ill
+habits of the mind are, like chronical diseases, to be corrected by
+degrees, and cured by alteratives; wherein, though purges are
+sometimes necessary, yet diet, good air, and moderate exercise have
+the greatest part.  The matter being thus stated, it will appear
+that both sorts of poetry are of use for their proper ends.  The
+stage is more active, the epic poem works at greater leisure; yet is
+active too when need requires, for dialogue is imitated by the drama
+from the more active parts of it.  One puts off a fit, like the
+quinquina, and relieves us only for a time; the other roots out the
+distemper, and gives a healthful habit.  The sun enlightens and
+cheers us, dispels fogs, and warms the ground with his daily beams;
+but the corn is sowed, increases, is ripened, and is reaped for use
+in process of time and in its proper season.
+
+I proceed from the greatness of the action to the dignity of the
+actors--I mean, to the persons employed in both poems.  There
+likewise tragedy will be seen to borrow from the epopee; and that
+which borrows is always of less dignity, because it has not of its
+own.  A subject, it is true, may lend to his sovereign; but the act
+of borrowing makes the king inferior, because he wants and the
+subject supplies.  And suppose the persons of the drama wholly
+fabulous, or of the poet's invention, yet heroic poetry gave him the
+examples of that invention, because it was first, and Homer the
+common father of the stage.  I know not of any one advantage which
+tragedy can boast above heroic poetry but that it is represented to
+the view as well as read, and instructs in the closet as well as on
+the theatre.  This is an uncontended excellence, and a chief branch
+of its prerogative; yet I may be allowed to say without partiality
+that herein the actors share the poet's praise.  Your lordship knows
+some modern tragedies which are beautiful on the stage, and yet I am
+confident you would not read them.  Tryphon the stationer complains
+they are seldom asked for in his shop.  The poet who flourished in
+the scene is damned in the ruelle; nay, more, he is not esteemed a
+good poet by those who see and hear his extravagances with delight.
+They are a sort of stately fustian and lofty childishness.  Nothing
+but nature can give a sincere pleasure; where that is not imitated,
+it is grotesque painting; the fine woman ends in a fish's tail.
+
+I might also add that many things which not only please, but are
+real beauties in the reading, would appear absurd upon the stage;
+and those not only the speciosa miracula, as Horace calls them, of
+transformations of Scylla, Antiphates, and the Laestrygons (which
+cannot be represented even in operas), but the prowess of Achilles
+or AEneas would appear ridiculous in our dwarf-heroes of the
+theatre.  We can believe they routed armies in Homer or in Virgil,
+but ne Hercules contra duos in the drama.  I forbear to instance in
+many things which the stage cannot or ought not to represent; for I
+have said already more than I intended on this subject, and should
+fear it might be turned against me that I plead for the pre-eminence
+of epic poetry because I have taken some pains in translating
+Virgil, if this were the first time that I had delivered my opinion
+in this dispute; but I have more than once already maintained the
+rights of my two masters against their rivals of the scene, even
+while I wrote tragedies myself and had no thoughts of this present
+undertaking.  I submit my opinion to your judgment, who are better
+qualified than any man I know to decide this controversy.  You come,
+my lord, instructed in the cause, and needed not that I should open
+it.  Your "Essay of Poetry," which was published without a name, and
+of which I was not honoured with the confidence, I read over and
+over with much delight and as much instruction, and without
+flattering you, or making myself more moral than I am, not without
+some envy.  I was loth to be informed how an epic poem should be
+written, or how a tragedy should be contrived and managed, in better
+verse and with more judgment than I could teach others.  A native of
+Parnassus, and bred up in the studies of its fundamental laws, may
+receive new lights from his contemporaries, but it is a grudging
+kind of praise which he gives his benefactors.  He is more obliged
+than he is willing to acknowledge; there is a tincture of malice in
+his commendations:  for where I own I am taught, I confess my want
+of knowledge.  A judge upon the bench may, out of good nature, or,
+at least, interest, encourage the pleadings of a puny counsellor,
+but he does not willingly commend his brother-serjeant at the bar,
+especially when he controls his law, and exposes that ignorance
+which is made sacred by his place.  I gave the unknown author his
+due commendation, I must confess; but who can answer for me, and for
+the rest of the poets who heard me read the poem, whether we should
+not have been better pleased to have seen our own names at the
+bottom of the title-page?  Perhaps we commended it the more that we
+might seem to be above the censure.  We are naturally displeased
+with an unknown critic, as the ladies are with a lampooner, because
+we are bitten in the dark, and know not where to fasten our revenge;
+but great excellences will work their way through all sorts of
+opposition.  I applauded rather out of decency than affection; and
+was ambitious, as some yet can witness, to be acquainted with a man
+with whom I had the honour to converse, and that almost daily, for
+so many years together.  Heaven knows if I have heartily forgiven
+you this deceit.  You extorted a praise, which I should willingly
+have given had I known you.  Nothing had been more easy than to
+commend a patron of a long standing.  The world would join with me
+if the encomiums were just, and if unjust would excuse a grateful
+flatterer.  But to come anonymous upon me, and force me to commend
+you against my interest, was not altogether so fair, give me leave
+to say, as it was politic; for by concealing your quality you might
+clearly understand how your work succeeded, and that the general
+approbation was given to your merit, not your titles.  Thus, like
+Apelles, you stood unseen behind your own Venus, and received the
+praises of the passing multitude.  The work was commended, not the
+author; and, I doubt not, this was one of the most pleasing
+adventures of your life.
+
+I have detained your lordship longer than I intended in this dispute
+of preference betwixt the epic poem and the drama, and yet have not
+formally answered any of the arguments which are brought by
+Aristotle on the other side, and set in the fairest light by Dacier.
+But I suppose without looking on the book, I may have touched on
+some of the objections; for in this address to your lordship I
+design not a treatise of heroic poetry, but write in a loose
+epistolary way somewhat tending to that subject, after the example
+of Horace in his first epistle of the second book to Augustus
+Caesar, and of that to the Pisos, which we call his "Art of Poetry,"
+in both of which he observes no method that I can trace, whatever
+Scaliger the father, or Heinsius may have seen, or rather think they
+had seen.  I have taken up, laid down, and resumed, as often as I
+pleased, the same subject, and this loose proceeding I shall use
+through all this prefatory dedication.  Yet all this while I have
+been sailing with some side-wind or other toward the point I
+proposed in the beginning--the greatness and excellence of an heroic
+poem, with some of the difficulties which attend that work.  The
+comparison therefore which I made betwixt the epopee and the tragedy
+was not altogether a digression, for it is concluded on all hands
+that they are both the masterpieces of human wit.
+
+In the meantime I may be bold to draw this corollary from what has
+been already said--that the file of heroic poets is very short; all
+are not such who have assumed that lofty title in ancient or modern
+ages, or have been so esteemed by their partial and ignorant
+admirers.
+
+There have been but one great "Ilias" and one "AEneis" in so many
+ages; the next (but the next with a long interval betwixt) was the
+"Jerusalem"--I mean, not so much in distance of time as in
+excellence.  After these three are entered, some Lord Chamberlain
+should be appointed, some critic of authority should be set before
+the door to keep out a crowd of little poets who press for
+admission, and are not of quality.  Maevius would be deafening your
+lordship's ears with his
+
+
+"Fortunam Priami cantabo, et nobile bellum."
+
+
+Mere fustian (as Horace would tell you from behind, without pressing
+forward), and more smoke than fire.  Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto
+would cry out, "Make room for the Italian poets, the descendants of
+Virgil in a right line."  Father Le Moine with his "Saint Louis,"
+and Scudery with his "Alaric" (for a godly king and a Gothic
+conqueror); and Chapelain would take it ill that his "Maid" should
+be refused a place with Helen and Lavinia.  Spenser has a better
+plea for his "Faerie Queen," had his action been finished, or had
+been one; and Milton, if the devil had not been his hero instead of
+Adam; if the giant had not foiled the knight, and driven him out of
+his stronghold to wander through the world with his lady-errant; and
+if there had not been more machining persons than human in his poem.
+After these the rest of our English poets shall not be mentioned; I
+have that honour for them which I ought to have; but if they are
+worthies, they are not to be ranked amongst the three whom I have
+named, and who are established in their reputation.
+
+Before I quitted the comparison betwixt epic poetry and tragedy I
+should have acquainted my judge with one advantage of the former
+over the latter, which I now casually remember out of the preface of
+Segrais before his translation of the "AEneis," or out of Bossu--no
+matter which:  "The style of the heroic poem is, and ought to be,
+more lofty than that of the drama."  The critic is certainly in the
+right, for the reason already urged--the work of tragedy is on the
+passions, and in dialogue; both of them abhor strong metaphors, in
+which the epopee delights.  A poet cannot speak too plainly on the
+stage, for volat irrevocabile verbum (the sense is lost if it be not
+taken flying) but what we read alone we have leisure to digest.
+There an author may beautify his sense by the boldness of his
+expression, which if we understand not fully at the first we may
+dwell upon it till we find the secret force and excellence.  That
+which cures the manners by alterative physic, as I said before, must
+proceed by insensible degrees; but that which purges the passions
+must do its business all at once, or wholly fail of its effect--at
+least, in the present operation--and without repeated doses.  We
+must beat the iron while it is hot, but we may polish it at leisure.
+Thus, my lord, you pay the fine of my forgetfulness,; and yet the
+merits of both causes are where they were, and undecided, till you
+declare whether it be more for the benefit of mankind to have their
+manners in general corrected, or their pride and hard-heartedness
+removed.
+
+I must now come closer to my present business, and not think of
+making more invasive wars abroad, when, like Hannibal, I am called
+back to the defence of my own country.  Virgil is attacked by many
+enemies; he has a whole confederacy against him; and I must
+endeavour to defend him as well as I am able.  But their principal
+objections being against his moral, the duration or length of time
+taken up in the action of the poem, and what they have to urge
+against the manners of his hero, I shall omit the rest as mere
+cavils of grammarians--at the worst but casual slips of a great
+man's pen, or inconsiderable faults of an admirable poem, which the
+author had not leisure to review before his death.  Macrobius has
+answered what the ancients could urge against him, and some things I
+have lately read in Tannegui le Febvre, Valois, and another whom I
+name not, which are scarce worth answering.  They begin with the
+moral of his poem, which I have elsewhere confessed, and still must
+own, not to be so noble as that of Homer.  But let both be fairly
+stated, and without contradicting my first opinion I can show that
+Virgil's was as useful to the Romans of his age as Homer's was to
+the Grecians of his, in what time soever he may be supposed to have
+lived and flourished.  Homer's moral was to urge the necessity of
+union, and of a good understanding betwixt confederate states and
+princes engaged in a war with a mighty monarch; as also of
+discipline in an army, and obedience in the several chiefs to the
+supreme commander of the joint forces.  To inculcate this, he sets
+forth the ruinous effects of discord in the camp of those allies,
+occasioned by the quarrel betwixt the general and one of the next in
+office under him.  Agamemnon gives the provocation, and Achilles
+resents the injury.  Both parties are faulty in the quarrel, and
+accordingly they are both punished; the aggressor is forced to sue
+for peace to his inferior on dishonourable conditions; the deserter
+refuses the satisfaction offered, and his obstinacy costs him his
+best friend.  This works the natural effect of choler, and turns his
+rage against him by whom he was last affronted, and most sensibly.
+The greater anger expels the less, but his character is still
+preserved.  In the meantime the Grecian army receives loss on loss,
+and is half destroyed by a pestilence into the bargain:-
+
+
+"Quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi."
+
+
+As the poet in the first part of the example had shown the bad
+effects of discord, so after the reconcilement he gives the good
+effects of unity; for Hector is slain, and then Troy must fall.  By
+this it is probable that Homer lived when the Median monarchy was
+grown formidable to the Grecians, and that the joint endeavours of
+his countrymen were little enough to preserve their common freedom
+from an encroaching enemy.  Such was his moral, which all critics
+have allowed to be more noble than that of Virgil, though not
+adapted to the times in which the Roman poet lived.  Had Virgil
+flourished in the age of Ennius and addressed to Scipio, he had
+probably taken the same moral, or some other not unlike it; for then
+the Romans were in as much danger from the Carthaginian commonwealth
+as the Grecians were from the Assyrian or Median monarchy.  But we
+are to consider him as writing his poem in a time when the old form
+of government was subverted, and a new one just established by
+Octavius Caesar--in effect, by force of arms, but seemingly by the
+consent of the Roman people.  The commonwealth had received a deadly
+wound in the former civil wars betwixt Marius and Sylla.  The
+commons, while the first prevailed, had almost shaken off the yoke
+of the nobility; and Marius and Cinna (like the captains of the
+mob), under the specious pretence of the public good and of doing
+justice on the oppressors of their liberty, revenged themselves
+without form of law on their private enemies.  Sylla, in his turn,
+proscribed the heads of the adverse party.  He, too, had nothing but
+liberty and reformation in his mouth; for the cause of religion is
+but a modern motive to rebellion, invented by the Christian
+priesthood refining on the heathen.  Sylla, to be sure, meant no
+more good to the Roman people than Marius before him, whatever he
+declared; but sacrificed the lives and took the estates of all his
+enemies to gratify those who brought him into power.  Such was the
+reformation of the government by both parties.  The senate and the
+commons were the two bases on which it stood, and the two champions
+of either faction each destroyed the foundations of the other side;
+so the fabric, of consequence, must fall betwixt them, and tyranny
+must be built upon their ruins.  THIS COMES OF ALTERING FUNDAMENTAL
+LAWS AND CONSTITUTIONS; like him who, being in good health, lodged
+himself in a physician's house, and was over-persuaded by his
+landlord to take physic (of which be died) for the benefit of his
+doctor.  "Stavo ben," was written on his monument, "ma, per star
+meglio, sto qui."
+
+After the death of those two usurpers the commonwealth seemed to
+recover, and held up its head for a little time, but it was all the
+while in a deep consumption, which is a flattering disease.  Pompey,
+Crassus, and Caesar had found the sweets of arbitrary power, and
+each being a check to the other's growth, struck up a false
+friendship amongst themselves and divided the government betwixt
+them, which none of them was able to assume alone.  These were the
+public-spirited men of their age--that is, patriots for their own
+interest.  The commonwealth looked with a florid countenance in
+their management; spread in bulk, and all the while was wasting in
+the vitals.  Not to trouble your lordship with the repetition of
+what you know, after the death of Crassus Pompey found himself
+outwitted by Caesar, broke with him, overpowered him in the senate,
+and caused many unjust decrees to pass against him.  Caesar thus
+injured, and unable to resist the faction of the nobles which was
+now uppermost (for he was a Marian), had recourse to arms, and his
+cause was just against Pompey, but not against his country, whose
+constitution ought to have been sacred to him, and never to have
+been violated on the account of any private wrong.  But he
+prevailed, and Heaven declaring for him, he became a providential
+monarch under the title of Perpetual Dictator.  He being murdered by
+his own son (whom I neither dare commend nor can justly blame,
+though Dante in his "Inferno" has put him and Cassius, and Judas
+Iscariot betwixt them, into the great devil's mouth), the
+commonwealth popped up its head for the third time under Brutus and
+Cassius, and then sank for ever.
+
+Thus the Roman people were grossly gulled twice or thrice over, and
+as often enslaved, in one century, and under the same pretence of
+reformation.  At last the two battles of Philippi gave the decisive
+stroke against liberty, and not long after the commonwealth was
+turned into a monarchy by the conduct and good fortune of Augustus.
+It is true that the despotic power could not have fallen into better
+hands than those of the first and second Caesar.  Your lordship well
+knows what obligations Virgil had to the latter of them.  He saw,
+beside, that the commonwealth was lost without resource; the heads
+of it destroyed; the senate, new moulded, grown degenerate, and
+either bought off or thrusting their own necks into the yoke out of
+fear of being forced.  Yet I may safely affirm for our great author
+(as men of good sense are generally honest) that he was still of
+republican principles in heart.
+
+
+"Secretosque pios; his dantem jura Catonem."
+
+
+I think I need use no other argument to justify my opinion than that
+of this one line taken from the eighth book of the AEneis.  If he
+had not well studied his patron's temper it might have ruined him
+with another prince.  But Augustus was not discontented (at least,
+that we can find) that Cato was placed by his own poet in Elysium,
+and there giving laws to the holy souls who deserved to be separated
+from the vulgar sort of good spirits; for his conscience could not
+but whisper to the arbitrary monarch that the kings of Rome were at
+first elective, and governed not without a senate; that Romulus was
+no hereditary prince, and though after his death he received divine
+honours for the good he did on earth, yet he was but a god of their
+own making; that the last Tarquin was expelled justly for overt acts
+of tyranny and mal-administration (for such are the conditions of an
+elective kingdom, and I meddle not with others, being, for my own
+opinion, of Montange's principles--that an honest man ought to be
+contented with that form of government, and with those fundamental
+constitutions of it, which he received from his ancestors, and under
+which himself was born, though at the same time he confessed freely
+that if he could have chosen his place of birth it should have been
+at Venice, which for many reasons I dislike, and am better pleased
+to have been born an Englishman).
+
+But to return from my long rambling; I say that Virgil having
+maturely weighed the condition of the times in which he lived; that
+an entire liberty was not to be retrieved; that the present
+settlement had the prospect of a long continuance in the same family
+or those adopted into it; that he held his paternal estate from the
+bounty of the conqueror, by whom he was likewise enriched, esteemed,
+and cherished; that this conqueror, though of a bad kind, was the
+very best of it; that the arts of peace flourished under him; that
+all men might be happy if they would be quiet; that now he was in
+possession of the whole, yet he shared a great part of his authority
+with the senate; that he would be chosen into the ancient offices of
+the commonwealth, and ruled by the power which he derived from them,
+and prorogued his government from time to time, still, as it were,
+threatening to dismiss himself from public cares, which he exercised
+more for the common good than for any delight he took in greatness--
+these things, I say, being considered by the poet, he concluded it
+to be the interest of his country to be so governed, to infuse an
+awful respect into the people towards such a prince, by that respect
+to confirm their obedience to him, and by that obedience to make
+them happy.  This was the moral of his divine poem; honest in the
+poet, honourable to the emperor (whom he derives from a divine
+extraction), and reflecting part of that honour on the Roman people
+(whom he derives also from the Trojans), and not only profitable,
+but necessary, to the present age, and likely to be such to their
+posterity.  That it was the received opinion that the Romans were
+descended from the Trojans, and Julius Caesar from Iulus, the son of
+AEneas, was enough for Virgil, though perhaps he thought not so
+himself, or that AEneas ever was in Italy, which Bochartus
+manifestly proves.  And Homer (where he says that Jupiter hated the
+house of Priam, and was resolved to transfer the kingdom to the
+family of AEneas) yet mentions nothing of his leading a colony into
+a foreign country and settling there.  But that the Romans valued
+themselves on their Trojan ancestry is so undoubted a truth that I
+need not prove it.  Even the seals which we have remaining of Julius
+Caesar (which we know to be antique) have the star of Venus over
+them--though they were all graven after his death--as a note that he
+was deified.  I doubt not but one reason why Augustus should be so
+passionately concerned for the preservation of the "AEneis," which
+its author had condemned to be burnt as an imperfect poem by his
+last will and testament, was because it did him a real service as
+well as an honour; that a work should not be lost where his divine
+original was celebrated in verse which had the character of
+immortality stamped upon it.
+
+Neither were the great Roman families which flourished in his time
+less obliged by him than the emperor.  Your lordship knows with what
+address he makes mention of them as captains of ships or leaders in
+the war; and even some of Italian extraction are not forgotten.
+These are the single stars which are sprinkled through the "AEneis,"
+but there are whole constellations of them in the fifth book; and I
+could not but take notice, when I translated it, of some favourite
+families to which he gives the victory and awards the prizes, in the
+person of his hero, at the funeral games which were celebrated in
+honour of Anchises.  I insist not on their names, but am pleased to
+find the Memmii amongst them, derived from Mnestheus, because
+Lucretius dedicates to one of that family, a branch of which
+destroyed Corinth.  I likewise either found or formed an image to
+myself of the contrary kind--that those who lost the prizes were
+such as had disobliged the poet, or were in disgrace with Augustus,
+or enemies to Maecenas; and this was the poetical revenge he took,
+for genus irritabile vatum, as Horace says.  When a poet is
+thoroughly provoked, he will do himself justice, how ever dear it
+cost him, animamque in vulnere ponit.  I think these are not bare
+imaginations of my own, though I find no trace of them in the
+commentators; but one poet may judge of another by himself.  The
+vengeance we defer is not forgotten.  I hinted before that the whole
+Roman people were obliged by Virgil in deriving them from Troy, an
+ancestry which they affected.  We and the French are of the same
+humour:  they would be thought to descend from a son, I think, of
+Hector; and we would have our Britain both named and planted by a
+descendant of AEneas.  Spenser favours this opinion what he can.
+His Prince Arthur, or whoever he intends by him, is a Trojan.  Thus
+the hero of Homer was a Grecian; of Virgil, a Roman; of Tasso, an
+Italian.
+
+I have transgressed my bounds and gone farther than the moral led
+me; but if your lordship is not tired, I am safe enough.
+
+Thus far, I think, my author is defended.  But as Augustus is still
+shadowed in the person of AEneas (of which I shall say more when I
+come to the manners which the poet gives his hero), I must prepare
+that subject by showing how dexterously he managed both the prince
+and people, so as to displease neither, and to do good to both--
+which is the part of a wise and an honest man, and proves that it is
+possible for a courtier not to be a knave.  I shall continue still
+to speak my thoughts like a free-born subject, as I am, though such
+things perhaps as no Dutch commentator could, and I am sure no
+Frenchman durst.  I have already told your lordship my opinion of
+Virgil--that he was no arbitrary man.  Obliged he was to his master
+for his bounty, and he repays him with good counsel how to behave
+himself in his new monarchy so as to gain the affections of his
+subjects, and deserve to be called the "Father of His Country."
+From this consideration it is that he chose for the groundwork of
+his poem one empire destroyed, and another raised from the ruins of
+it.  This was just the parallel.  AEneas could not pretend to be
+Priam's heir in a lineal succession, for Anchises, the hero's
+father, was only of the second branch of the royal family, and
+Helenus, a son of Priam, was yet surviving, and might lawfully claim
+before him.  It may be, Virgil mentions him on that account.
+Neither has he forgotten Priamus, in the fifth of his "AEneis," the
+son of Polites, youngest son to Priam, who was slain by Pyrrhus in
+the second book.  AEneas had only married Creusa, Priam's daughter,
+and by her could have no title while any of the male issue were
+remaining.  In this case the poet gave him the next title, which is
+that of an Elective King.  The remaining Trojans chose him to lead
+them forth and settle them in some foreign country.  Ilioneus in his
+speech to Dido calls him expressly by the name of king.  Our poet,
+who all this while had Augustus in his eye, had no desire he should
+seem to succeed by any right of inheritance derived from Julius
+Caesar, such a title being but one degree removed from conquest:
+for what was introduced by force, by force may be removed.  It was
+better for the people that they should give than he should take,
+since that gift was indeed no more at bottom than a trust.  Virgil
+gives us an example of this in the person of Mezentius.  He governed
+arbitrarily; he was expelled and came to the deserved end of all
+tyrants.  Our author shows us another sort of kingship in the person
+of Latinus.  He was descended from Saturn, and, as I remember, in
+the third degree.  He is described a just and a gracious prince,
+solicitous for the welfare of his people, always consulting with his
+senate to promote the common good.  We find him at the head of them
+when he enters into the council-hall--speaking first, but still
+demanding their advice, and steering by it, as far as the iniquity
+of the times would suffer him.  And this is the proper character of
+a king by inheritance, who is born a father of his country.  AEneas,
+though he married the heiress of the crown, yet claimed no title to
+it during the life of his father-in-law.  Socer arma Latinus hebeto,
+&c., are Virgil's words.  As for himself, he was contented to take
+care of his country gods, who were not those of Latium; wherein our
+divine author seems to relate to the after-practice of the Romans,
+which was to adopt the gods of those they conquered or received as
+members of their commonwealth.  Yet, withal, he plainly touches at
+the office of the high-priesthood, with which Augustus was invested
+and which made his person more sacred and inviolable than even the
+tribunitial power.  It was not therefore for nothing that the most
+judicious of all poets made that office vacant by the death of
+Pantheus, in the second book of the "AEneis," for his hero to
+succeed in it, and consequently for Augustus to enjoy.  I know not
+that any of the commentators have taken notice of that passage.  If
+they have not, I am sure they ought; and if they have, I am not
+indebted to them for the observation.  The words of Virgil are very
+plain:-
+
+
+"Sacra suosque tibi commendat Troja Penates."
+
+
+As for Augustus or his uncle Julius claiming by descent from AEneas,
+that title is already out of doors.  AEneas succeeded not, but was
+elected.  Troy was fore-doomed to fall for ever:-
+
+
+"Postquam res Asiae, Priamique evertere gentem,
+Immeritam visum superis."--AENEIS, I. iii., line 1.
+
+
+Augustus, it is true, had once resolved to rebuild that city, and
+there to make the seat of the Empire; but Horace writes an ode on
+purpose to deter him from that thought, declaring the place to be
+accursed, and that the gods would as often destroy it as it should
+be raised.  Hereupon the emperor laid aside a project so ungrateful
+to the Roman people.  But by this, my lord, we may conclude that he
+had still his pedigree in his head, and had an itch of being thought
+a divine king if his poets had not given him better counsel.
+
+I will pass by many less material objections for want of room to
+answer them.  What follows next is of great importance, if the
+critics can make out their charge, for it is levelled at the manners
+which our poet gives his hero, and which are the same which were
+eminently seen in his Augustus.  Those manners were piety to the
+gods and a dutiful affection to his father, love to his relations,
+care of his people, courage and conduct in the wars, gratitude to
+those who had obliged him, and justice in general to mankind.
+
+Piety, as your lordship sees, takes place of all as the chief part
+of his character; and the word in Latin is more full than it can
+possibly be expressed in any modern language, for there it
+comprehends not only devotion to the gods, but filial love and
+tender affection to relations of all sorts.  As instances of this
+the deities of Troy and his own Penates are made the companions of
+his flight; they appear to him in his voyage and advise him, and at
+last he replaces them in Italy, their native country.  For his
+father, he takes him on his back.  He leads his little son, his wife
+follows him; but losing his footsteps through fear or ignorance he
+goes back into the midst of his enemies to find her, and leaves not
+his pursuit till her ghost appears to forbid his farther search.  I
+will say nothing of his duty to his father while he lived, his
+sorrow for his death, of the games instituted in honour of his
+memory, or seeking him by his command even after death in the
+Elysian fields.  I will not mention his tenderness for his son,
+which everywhere is visible; of his raising a tomb for Polydorus;
+the obsequies for Misenus; his pious remembrance of Deiphobus; the
+funerals of his nurse; his grief for Pallas, and his revenge taken
+on his murderer, whom otherwise, by his natural compassion, he had
+forgiven:  and then the poem had been left imperfect, for we could
+have had no certain prospect of his happiness while the last
+obstacle to it was unremoved.
+
+Of the other parts which compose his character as a king or as a
+general I need say nothing; the whole "AEneis" is one continued
+instance of some one or other of them; and where I find anything of
+them taxed, it shall suffice me (as briefly as I can) to vindicate
+my divine master to your lordship, and by you to the reader.  But
+herein Segrais, in his admirable preface to his translation of the
+"AEneis," as the author of the Dauphin's "Virgil" justly calls it,
+has prevented me.  Him I follow, and what I borrow from him am ready
+to acknowledge to him, for, impartially speaking, the French are as
+much better critics than the English as they are worse poets.  Thus
+we generally allow that they better understand the management of a
+war than our islanders, but we know we are superior to them in the
+day of battle; they value themselves on their generals, we on our
+soldiers.  But this is not the proper place to decide that question,
+if they make it one.  I shall say perhaps as much of other nations
+and their poets (excepting only Tasso), and hope to make my
+assertion good, which is but doing justice to my country--part of
+which honour will reflect on your lordship, whose thoughts are
+always just, your numbers harmonious, your words chosen, your
+expressions strong and manly, your verse flowing, and your turns as
+happy as they are easy.  If you would set us more copies, your
+example would make all precepts needless.  In the meantime that
+little you have written is owned, and that particularly by the poets
+(who are a nation not over-lavish of praise to their
+contemporaries), as a principal ornament of our language; but the
+sweetest essences are always confined in the smallest glasses.
+
+When I speak of your lordship, it is never a digression, and
+therefore I need beg no pardon for it, but take up Segrais where I
+left him, and shall use him less often than I have occasion for him.
+For his preface is a perfect piece of criticism, full and clear, and
+digested into an exact method; mine is loose and, as I intended it,
+epistolary.  Yet I dwell on many things which he durst not touch,
+for it is dangerous to offend an arbitrary master, and every patron
+who has the power of Augustus has not his clemency.  In short, my
+lord, I would not translate him because I would bring you somewhat
+of my own.  His notes and observations on every book are of the same
+excellency, and for the same reason I omit the greater part.
+
+He takes no notice that Virgil is arraigned for placing piety before
+valour, and making that piety the chief character of his hero.  I
+have said already from Bossu, that a poet is not obliged to make his
+hero a virtuous man; therefore neither Homer nor Tasso are to be
+blamed for giving what predominant quality they pleased to their
+first character.  But Virgil, who designed to form a perfect prince,
+and would insinuate that Augustus (whom he calls AEneas in his poem)
+was truly such, found himself obliged to make him without blemish--
+thoroughly virtuous; and a thorough virtue both begins and ends in
+piety.  Tasso without question observed this before me, and
+therefore split his hero in two; he gave Godfrey piety, and Rinaldo
+fortitude, for their chief qualities or manners.  Homer, who had
+chosen another moral, makes both Agamemnon and Achilles vicious; for
+his design was to instruct in virtue by showing the deformity of
+vice.  I avoid repetition of that I have said above.  What follows
+is translated literally from Segrais:-
+
+"Virgil had considered that the greatest virtues of Augustus
+consisted in the perfect art of governing his people, which caused
+him to reign for more than forty years in great felicity.  He
+considered that his emperor was valiant, civil, popular, eloquent,
+politic, and religious; he has given all these qualities to AEneas.
+But knowing that piety alone comprehends the whole duty of man
+towards the gods, towards his country, and towards his relations, he
+judged that this ought to be his first character whom he would set
+for a pattern of perfection.  In reality, they who believe that the
+praises which arise from valour are superior to those which proceed
+from any other virtues, have not considered, as they ought, that
+valour, destitute of other virtues, cannot render a man worthy of
+any true esteem.  That quality, which signifies no more than an
+intrepid courage, may he separated from many others which are good,
+and accompanied with many which are ill.  A man may be very valiant,
+and yet impious and vicious; but the same cannot be said of piety,
+which excludes all ill qualities, and comprehends even valour
+itself, with all other qualities which are good.  Can we, for
+example, give the praise of valour to a man who should see his gods
+profaned, and should want the courage to defend them? to a man who
+should abandon his father, or desert his king, in his last
+necessity?"
+
+Thus far Segrais, in giving the preference to piety before valour; I
+will now follow him where he considers this valour or intrepid
+courage singly in itself; and this also Virgil gives to his AEneas,
+and that in a heroical degree.
+
+Having first concluded that our poet did for the best in taking the
+first character of his hero from that essential virtue on which the
+rest depend, he proceeds to tell us that in the ten years' war of
+Troy he was considered as the second champion of his country,
+allowing Hector the first place; and this even by the confession of
+Homer, who took all occasions of setting up his own countrymen the
+Grecians, and of undervaluing the Trojan chiefs.  But Virgil (whom
+Segrais forgot to cite) makes Diomede give him a higher character
+for strength and courage.  His testimony is this, in the eleventh
+book:-
+
+
+"Stetimus tela aspera contra,
+Contulimusque manus:  experto credite, quantus
+In clypeum adsurgat, quo turbine torqueat hastam.
+Si duo praeterea tales Inachias venisset ad urbes
+Dardanus, et versis lugeret Graecia fatis.
+Quicquid apud durae cessatum est maenia Trojae,
+Hectoris AEneaeque manu victoria Grajum
+Haesit, et in decumum vestigia retulit annum.
+Ambo animis, ambo insignes praestantibus armis:
+Hic pietate prior."
+
+
+I give not here my translation of these verses, though I think I
+have not ill succeeded in them, because your lordship is so great a
+master of the original that I have no reason to desire you should
+see Virgil and me so near together.  But you may please, my lord, to
+take notice that the Latin author refines upon the Greek, and
+insinuates that Homer had done his hero wrong in giving the
+advantage of the duel to his own countryman, though Diomedes was
+manifestly the second champion of the Grecians; and Ulysses
+preferred him before Ajax when he chose him for the companion of his
+nightly expedition, for he had a headpiece of his own, and wanted
+only the fortitude of another to bring him off with safety, and that
+he might compass his design with honour.
+
+The French translator thus proceeds:- "They who accuse AEneas for
+want of courage, either understand not Virgil or have read him
+slightly; otherwise they would not raise an objection so easy to be
+answered."  Hereupon he gives so many instances of the hero's valour
+that to repeat them after him would tire your lordship, and put me
+to the unnecessary trouble of transcribing the greatest part of the
+three last AEneids.  In short, more could not be expected from an
+Amadis, a Sir Lancelot, or the whole Round Table than he performs.
+Proxima quaeque metit galdio is the perfect account of a knight-
+errant.  If it be replied, continues Segrais, that it was not
+difficult for him to undertake and achieve such hardy enterprises
+because he wore enchanted arms, that accusation in the first place
+must fall on Homer ere it can reach Virgil.  Achilles was as well
+provided with them as AEneas, though he was invulnerable without
+them; and Ariosto, the two Tassos (Bernardo and Torquato), even our
+own Spenser--in a word, all modern poets--have copied Homer, as well
+as Virgil; he is neither the first nor last, but in the midst of
+them, and therefore is safe if they are so.  Who knows, says
+Segrais, but that his fated armour was only an allegorical defence,
+and signified no more than that he was under the peculiar protection
+of the gods? born, as the astrologers will tell us out of Virgil
+(who was well versed in the Chaldean mysteries), under the
+favourable influence of Jupiter, Venus, and the Sun?  But I insist
+not on this because I know you believe not there is such an art;
+though not only Horace and Persius, but Augustus himself, thought
+otherwise.  But in defence of Virgil, I dare positively say that he
+has been more cautious in this particular than either his
+predecessor or his descendants; for AEneas was actually wounded in
+the twelfth of the "AEneis," though he had the same godsmith to
+forge his arms as had Achilles.  It seems he was no "war-luck," as
+the Scots commonly call such men, who, they say, are iron-free or
+lead-free.  Yet after this experiment that his arms were not
+impenetrable (when he was cured indeed by his mother's help, because
+he was that day to conclude the war by the death of Turnus), the
+poet durst not carry the miracle too far and restore him wholly to
+his former vigour; he was still too weak to overtake his enemy, yet
+we see with what courage he attacks Turnus when he faces and renews
+the combat.  I need say no more, for Virgil defends himself without
+needing my assistance, and proves his hero truly to deserve that
+name.  He was not, then, a second-rate champion, as they would have
+him who think fortitude the first virtue in a hero.
+
+But being beaten from this hold, they will not yet allow him to be
+valiant, because he wept more often, as they think, than well
+becomes a man of courage.
+
+In the first place, if tears are arguments of cowardice, what shall
+I say of Homer's hero?  Shall Achilles pass for timorous because he
+wept, and wept on less occasions than AEneas?  Herein Virgil must be
+granted to have excelled his master; for once both heroes are
+described lamenting their lost loves:  Briseis was taken away by
+force from the Grecians, Creusa was lost for ever to her husband.
+But Achilles went roaring along the salt sea-shore, and, like a
+booby, was complaining to his mother when he should have revenged
+his injury by arms:  AEneas took a nobler course; for, having
+secured his father and his son, he repeated all his former dangers
+to have found his wife, if she had been above ground.  And here your
+lordship may observe the address of Virgil; it was not for nothing
+that this passage was related, with all these tender circumstances.
+AEneas told it, Dido heard it.  That he had been so affectionate a
+husband was no ill argument to the coming dowager that he might
+prove as kind to her.  Virgil has a thousand secret beauties, though
+I have not leisure to remark them.
+
+Segrais, on this subject of a hero's shedding tears, observes that
+historians commend Alexander for weeping when he read the mighty
+actions of Achilles; and Julius Caesar is likewise praised when out
+of the same noble envy, he wept at the victories of Alexander.  But
+if we observe more closely, we shall find that the tears of AEneas
+were always on a laudable occasion.  Thus he weeps out of compassion
+and tenderness of nature when in the temple of Carthage he beholds
+the pictures of his friends who sacrificed their lives in defence of
+their country.  He deplores the lamentable end of his pilot
+Palinurus, the untimely death of young Pallas his confederate, and
+the rest which I omit.  Yet even for these tears his wretched
+critics dare condemn him; they make AEneas little better than a kind
+of St. Swithin hero, always raining.  One of these censors was bold
+enough to argue him of cowardice, when in the beginning of the first
+book he not only weeps, but trembles, at an approaching storm:-
+
+
+"Extemplo AEneae solvuntur frigore membra:
+Ingemit, et duplices tendens ad sidera palmas," &c.
+
+
+But to this I have answered formerly that his fear was not for
+himself, but for his people.  And who can give a sovereign a better
+commendation, or recommend a hero more to the affection of the
+reader?  They were threatened with a tempest, and he wept; he was
+promised Italy, and therefore he prayed for the accomplishment of
+that promise;--all this in the beginning of a storm; therefore he
+showed the more early piety and the quicker sense of compassion.
+Thus much I have urged elsewhere in the defence of Virgil:  and
+since, I have been informed by Mr. Moyle, a young gentleman whom I
+can never sufficiently commend, that the ancients accounted drowning
+an accursed death.  So that if we grant him to have been afraid, he
+had just occasion for that fear, both in relation to himself and to
+his subjects.  I think our adversaries can carry this argument no
+farther, unless they tell us that he ought to have had more
+confidence in the promise of the gods.  But how was he assured that
+he had understood their oracles aright?  Helenus might be mistaken;
+Phoebus might speak doubtfully; even his mother might flatter him
+that he might prosecute his voyage, which if it succeeded happily he
+should be the founder of an empire:  for that she herself was
+doubtful of his fortune is apparent by the address she made to
+Jupiter on his behalf; to which the god makes answer in these
+words:-
+
+
+"Parce metu, Cytherea, manent immota tuorum
+Fata tibi," &c.
+
+
+Notwithstanding which the goddess, though comforted, was not
+assured; for even after this, through the course of the whole
+"AEneis," she still apprehends the interest which Juno might make
+with Jupiter against her son.  For it was a moot point in heaven
+whether he could alter fate or not; and indeed some passages in
+Virgil would make us suspect that he was of opinion Jupiter might
+defer fate, though he could not alter it; for in the latter end of
+the tenth book he introduces Juno begging for the life of Turnus,
+and flattering her husband with the power of changing destiny, tua,
+qui potes, orsa reflectas!  To which he graciously answers--
+
+
+"Si mora praesentis leti, tempusque caduco
+Oratur juveni, meque hoc ita ponere sentis,
+Tolle fuga Turnum, atquc instantibus eripe fatis.
+Hactenus indulsisse vacat.  Sin altior istis
+Sub precibus venia ulla latet, totumque moveri
+Mutarive putas bellum, spes pascis inanis."
+
+
+But that he could not alter those decrees the king of gods himself
+confesses in the book above cited, when he comforts Hercules for the
+death of Pallas, who had invoked his aid before he threw his lance
+at Turnus:-
+
+
+"Trojae sub maenibus altis
+Tot nati cecidere deum; quin occidit una
+Sarpedon, mea progenies; etiam sua Turnum
+Fata vocant, metasque dati pervenit ad aevi."
+
+
+Where he plainly acknowledges that he could not save his own son, or
+prevent the death which he foresaw.  Of his power to defer the blow,
+I once occasionally discoursed with that excellent person Sir Robert
+Howard, who is better conversant than any man that I know in the
+doctrine of the Stoics, and he set me right, from the concurrent
+testimony of philosophers and poets, that Jupiter could not retard
+the effects of fate, even for a moment; for when I cited Virgil as
+favouring the contrary opinion in that verse -
+
+
+"Tolle fuga Turnum, atque instantibus eripe fatis" -
+
+
+he replied, and I think with exact judgment, that when Jupiter gave
+Juno leave to withdraw Turnus from the present danger, it was
+because he certainly foreknew that his fatal hour was not come, that
+it was in destiny for Juno at that time to save him, and that
+himself obeyed destiny in giving her that leave.
+
+I need say no more in justification of our hero's courage, and am
+much deceived if he ever be attacked on this side of his character
+again.  But he is arraigned with more show of reason by the ladies,
+who will make a numerous party against him, for being false to love
+in forsaking Dido; and I cannot much blame them, for, to say the
+truth, it is an ill precedent for their gallants to follow.  Yet if
+I can bring him off with flying colours, they may learn experience
+at her cost; and for her sake avoid a cave as the worse shelter they
+can choose from a shower of rain, especially when they have a lover
+in their company.
+
+In the first place, Segrais observes with much acuteness that they
+who blame AEneas for his insensibility of love when he left
+Carthage, contradict their former accusation of him for being always
+crying, compassionate, and effeminately sensible of those
+misfortunes which befell others.  They give him two contrary
+characters; but Virgil makes him of a piece, always grateful, always
+tender-hearted.  But they are impudent enough to discharge
+themselves of this blunder by haying the contradiction at Virgil's
+door.  He, they say, has shown his hero with these inconsistent
+characters--acknowledging and ungrateful, compassionate and hard-
+hearted, but at the bottom fickle and self-interested; for Dido had
+not only received his weather-beaten troops before she saw him, and
+given them her protection, but had also offered them an equal share
+in her dominion:-
+
+
+"Vultis et his mecum pariter considere regnis?
+Urbem quam statuo, vesra est."
+
+
+This was an obligement never to be forgotten, and the more to be
+considered because antecedent to her love.  That passion, it is
+true, produced the usual effects of generosity, gallantry, and care
+to please, and thither we refer them; but when she had made all
+these advances, it was still in his power to have refused them.
+After the intrigue of the cave--call it marriage, or enjoyment only-
+-he was no longer free to take or leave; he had accepted the favour,
+and was obliged to be constant, if he would be grateful.
+
+My lord, I have set this argument in the best light I can, that the
+ladies may not think I write booty; and perhaps it may happen to me,
+as it did to Doctor Cudworth, who has raised such strong objections
+against the being of a God and Providence, that many think he has
+not answered them.  You may please at least to hear the adverse
+party.  Segrais pleads for Virgil that no less than an absolute
+command from Jupiter could excuse this insensibility of the hero,
+and this abrupt departure, which looks so like extreme ingratitude;
+but at the same time he does wisely to remember you that Virgil had
+made piety the first character of AEneas; and this being allowed, as
+I am afraid it must, he was obliged, antecedent to all other
+considerations, to search an asylum for his gods in Italy--for those
+very gods, I say, who had promised to his race the universal empire.
+Could a pious man dispense with the commands of Jupiter to satisfy
+his passion, or--take it in the strongest sense--to comply with the
+obligations of his gratitude?  Religion, it is true, must have moral
+honesty for its groundwork, or we shall be apt to suspect its truth;
+but an immediate revelation dispenses with all duties of morality.
+All casuists agree that theft is a breach of the moral law; yet if I
+might presume to mingle things sacred with profane, the Israelites
+only spoiled the Egyptians, not robbed them, because the propriety
+was transferred by a revelation to their lawgiver.  I confess Dido
+was a very infidel in this point; for she would not believe, as
+Virgil makes her say, that ever Jupiter would send Mercury on such
+an immoral errand.  But this needs no answer--at least, no more than
+Virgil gives it:-
+
+
+"Fata obstant, placidasque viri Deus obstruit aures."
+
+
+This notwithstanding, as Segrais confesses, he might have shown a
+little more sensibility when he left her, for that had been
+according to his character.
+
+But let Virgil answer for himself.  He still loved her, and
+struggled with his inclinations to obey the gods:-
+
+
+"Curam sub corde premebat,
+Multa gemens, magnoque animum labefactus amore."
+
+
+Upon the whole matter, and humanly speaking, I doubt there was a
+fault somewhere, and Jupiter is better able to bear the blame than
+either Virgil or AEneas.  The poet, it seems, had found it out, and
+therefore brings the deserting hero and the forsaken lady to meet
+together in the lower regions, where he excuses himself when it is
+too late, and accordingly she will take no satisfaction, nor so much
+as hear him.  Now Segrais is forced to abandon his defence, and
+excuses his author by saying that the "AEneis" is an imperfect work,
+and that death prevented the divine poet from reviewing it, and for
+that reason he had condemned it to the fire, though at the same time
+his two translators must acknowledge that the sixth book is the most
+correct of the whole "AEneis."  Oh, how convenient is a machine
+sometimes in a heroic poem!  This of Mercury is plainly one; and
+Virgil was constrained to use it here, or the honesty of his hero
+would be ill defended; and the fair sex, however, if they had the
+deserter in their power, would certainly have shown him no more
+mercy than the Bacchanals did Orpheus:  for if too much constancy
+may be a fault sometimes, then want of constancy, and ingratitude
+after the last favour, is a crime that never will be forgiven.  But
+of machines, more in their proper place, where I shall show with how
+much judgment they have been used by Virgil; and in the meantime
+pass to another article of his defence on the present subject,
+where, if I cannot clear the hero, I hope at least to bring off the
+poet, for here I must divide their causes.  Let AEneas trust to his
+machine, which will only help to break his fall; but the address is
+incomparable.  Plato, who borrowed so much from Homer, and yet
+concluded for the banishment of all poets, would at least have
+rewarded Virgil before he sent him into exile; but I go farther, and
+say that he ought to be acquitted, and deserved, beside, the bounty
+of Augustus and the gratitude of the Roman people.  If after this
+the ladies will stand out, let them remember that the jury is not
+all agreed; for Octavia was of his party, and was of the first
+quality in Rome:  she was also present at the reading of the sixth
+AEneid, and we know not that she condemned AEneas, but we are sure
+she presented the poet for his admirable elegy on her son Marcellus.
+
+But let us consider the secret reasons which Virgil had for thus
+framing this noble episode, wherein the whole passion of love is
+more exactly described than in any other poet.  Love was the theme
+of his fourth book; and though it is the shortest of the whole
+"AEneis," yet there he has given its beginning, its progress, its
+traverses, and its conclusion; and had exhausted so entirely this
+subject that he could resume it but very slightly in the eight
+ensuing books.
+
+She was warmed with the graceful appearance of the hero; she
+smothered those sparkles out of decency, but conversation blew them
+up into a flame.  Then she was forced to make a confidante of her
+whom she best might trust, her own sister, who approves the passion,
+and thereby augments it; then succeeds her public owning it; and
+after that the consummation.  Of Venus and Juno, Jupiter and
+Mercury, I say nothing (for they were all machining work); but
+possession having cooled his love, as it increased hers, she soon
+perceived the change, or at least grew suspicious of a change.  This
+suspicion soon turned to jealousy, and jealousy to rage; then she
+disdains and threatens, and again is humble and entreats:  and,
+nothing availing, despairs, curses, and at last becomes her own
+executioner.  See here the whole process of that passion, to which
+nothing can be added.  I dare go no farther, lest I should lose the
+connection of my discourse.
+
+To love our native country, and to study its benefit and its glory;
+to be interested in its concerns, is natural to all men, and is
+indeed our common duty.  A poet makes a farther step for
+endeavouring to do honour to it.  It is allowable in him even to be
+partial in its cause; for he is not tied to truth, or fettered by
+the laws of history.  Homer and Tasso are justly praised for
+choosing their heroes out of Greece and Italy; Virgil, indeed, made
+his a Trojan, but it was to derive the Romans and his own Augustus
+from him; but all the three poets are manifestly partial to their
+heroes in favour of their country.  For Dares Phrygius reports of
+Hector that he was slain cowardly; AEneas, according to the best
+account, slew not Mezentius, but was slain by him; and the
+chronicles of Italy tell us little of that Rinaldo d'Este who
+conquers Jerusalem in Tasso.  He might be a champion of the Church,
+but we know not that he was so much as present at the siege.  To
+apply this to Virgil, he thought himself engaged in honour to
+espouse the cause and quarrel of his country against Carthage.  He
+knew he could not please the Romans better, or oblige them more to
+patronise his poem, than by disgracing the foundress of that city.
+He shows her ungrateful to the memory of her first husband, doting
+on a stranger, enjoyed and afterwards forsaken by him.  This was the
+original, says he, of the immortal hatred betwixt the two rival
+nations.  It is true, he colours the falsehood of AEneas by an
+express command from Jupiter to forsake the queen who had obliged
+him; but he knew the Romans were to be his readers, and them he
+bribed--perhaps at the expense of his hero's honesty; but he gained
+his cause, however, as pleading before corrupt judges.  They were
+content to see their founder false to love, for still he had the
+advantage of the amour.  It was their enemy whom he forsook, and she
+might have forsaken him if he had not got the start of her.  She had
+already forgotten her vows to her Sichaeus, and varium et nutabile
+semper femina is the sharpest satire in the fewest words that ever
+was made on womankind; for both the adjectives are neuter, and
+animal must be understood to make them grammar.  Virgil does well to
+put those words into the mouth of Mercury.  If a god had not spoken
+them, neither durst he have written them, nor I translated them.
+Yet the deity was forced to come twice on the same errand; and the
+second time, as much a hero as AEneas was, he frighted him.  It
+seems he feared not Jupiter so much as Dido; for your lordship may
+observe that, as much intent as he was upon his voyage, yet he still
+delayed it, till the messenger was obliged to tell him plainly that
+if he weighed not anchor in the night the queen would be with him in
+the morning, notumque furens quid femina possit:  she was injured,
+she was revengeful, she was powerful.  The poet had likewise before
+hinted that the people were naturally perfidious, for he gives their
+character in the queen, and makes a proverb of Punica fides many
+ages before it was invented.
+
+Thus I hope, my lord, that I have made good my promise, and
+justified the poet, whatever becomes of the false knight.  And,
+sure, a poet is as much privileged to lie as an ambassador for the
+honour and interest of his country--at least, as Sir Henry Wotton
+has defined.
+
+This naturally leads me to the defence of the famous anachronism in
+making AEneas and Dido contemporaries, for it is certain that the
+hero lived almost two hundred years before the building of Carthage.
+One who imitates Boccalini says that Virgil was accused before
+Apollo for this error.  The god soon found that he was not able to
+defend his favourite by reason, for the case was clear; he therefore
+gave this middle sentence:  that anything might be allowed to his
+son Virgil on the account of his other merits; that, being a
+monarch, he had a dispensing power, and pardoned him.  But that this
+special act of grace might never be drawn into example, or pleaded
+by his puny successors in justification of their ignorance, he
+decreed for the future--no poet should presume to make a lady die
+for love two hundred years before her birth.  To moralise this
+story, Virgil is the Apollo who has this dispensing power.  His
+great judgment made the laws of poetry, but he never made himself a
+slave to them; chronology at best is but a cobweb law, and he broke
+through it with his weight.  They who will imitate him wisely must
+choose, as he did, an obscure and a remote era, where they may
+invent at pleasure, and not be easily contradicted.  Neither he nor
+the Romans had ever read the Bible, by which only his false
+computation of times can be made out against him.  This Segrais says
+in his defence, and proves it from his learned friend Bochartus,
+whose letter on this subject he has printed at the end of the fourth
+AEneid, to which I refer your lordship and the reader.  Yet the
+credit of Virgil was so great that he made this fable of his own
+invention pass for an authentic history, or at least as credible as
+anything in Homer.  Ovid takes it up after him even in the same age,
+and makes an ancient heroine of Virgil's new-created Dido; dictates
+a letter for her, just before her death, to the ingrateful fugitive;
+and, very unluckily for himself, is for measuring a sword with a man
+so much superior in force to him on the same subject.  I think I may
+be judge of this, because I have translated both.  The famous author
+of "The Art of Love" has nothing of his own; he borrows all from a
+greater master in his own profession, and, which is worse, improves
+nothing which he finds.  Nature fails him; and, being forced to his
+old shift, he has recourse to witticism.  This passes, indeed, with
+his soft admirers, and gives him the preference to Virgil in their
+esteem; but let them like for themselves, and not prescribe to
+others, for our author needs not their admiration.
+
+The motive that induced Virgil to coin this fable I have showed
+already, and have also begun to show that he might make this
+anachronism, by superseding the mechanic rules of poetry, for the
+same reason that a monarch may dispense with or suspend his own laws
+when he finds it necessary so to do, especially if those laws are
+not altogether fundamental.  Nothing is to be called a fault in
+poetry, says Aristotle, but what is against the art; therefore a man
+may be an admirable poet without being an exact chronologer.  Shall
+we dare, continues Segrais, to condemn Virgil for having made a
+fiction against the order of time, when we commend Ovid and other
+poets who have made many of their fictions against the order of
+nature?  For what else are the splendid miracles of the
+"Metamorphoses?"  Yet these are beautiful as they are related, and
+have also deep learning and instructive mythologies couched under
+them.  But to give, as Virgil does in this episode, the original
+cause of the long wars betwixt Rome and Carthage; to draw truth out
+of fiction after so probable a manner, with so much beauty, and so
+much for the honour of his country, was proper only to the divine
+wit of Maro; and Tasso, in one of his discourses, admires him for
+this particularly.  It is not lawful indeed to contradict a point of
+history which is known to all the world--as, for example, to make
+Hannibal and Scipio contemporaries with Alexander--but in the dark
+recesses of antiquity a great poet may and ought to feign such
+things as he finds not there, if they can be brought to embellish
+that subject which he treats.  On the other side, the pains and
+diligence of ill poets is but thrown away when they want the genius
+to invent and feign agreeably.  But if the fictions be delightful
+(which they always are if they be natural) if they be of a piece; if
+the beginning, the middle, and the end be in their due places, and
+artfully united to each other, such works can never fail of their
+deserved success.  And such is Virgil's episode of Dido and AEneas,
+where the sourest critic must acknowledge that if he had deprived
+his "AEneis" of so great an ornament, because he found no traces of
+it in antiquity, he had avoided their unjust censure, but had wanted
+one of the greatest beauties of his poem.
+
+I shall say more of this in the next article of their charge against
+him, which is--want of invention.  In the meantime I may affirm, in
+honour of this episode, that it is not only now esteemed the most
+pleasing entertainment of the "AEneis," but was so accounted in his
+own age, and before it was mellowed into that reputation which time
+has given it; for which I need produce no other testimony than that
+of Ovid, his contemporary:-
+
+
+"Nec pars ulla magis legitur de corpore toto,
+Quam non legitimo faedere junctus amor."
+
+
+Where, by the way, you may observe, my lord, that Ovid in those
+words, non legitimo faedere junctus amor, will by no means allow it
+to be a lawful marriage betwixt Dido and AEneas.  He was in
+banishment when he wrote those verses, which I cite from his letter
+to Augustus.  "You, sir," saith he, "have sent me into exile for
+writing my 'Art of Love' and my wanton elegies; yet your own poet
+was happy in your good graces, though he brought Dido and AEneas
+into a cave, and left them there not over-honestly together:  may I
+be so bold to ask your majesty is it a greater fault to teach the
+art of unlawful love than to show it in the action?"  But was Ovid
+the court-poet so bad a courtier as to find no other plea to excuse
+himself than by a plain accusation of his master?  Virgil confessed
+it was a lawful marriage betwixt the lovers; that Juno, the goddess
+of matrimony, had ratified it by her presence (for it was her
+business to bring matters to that issue):  that the ceremonies were
+short we may believe, for Dido was not only amorous, but a widow.
+Mercury himself, though employed on a quite contrary errand, yet
+owns it a marriage by an innuendo--pulchramque uxorius urbem
+extruis.  He calls AEneas not only a husband, but upbraids him for
+being a fond husband, as the word uxorius implies.  Now mark a
+little, if your lordship pleases, why Virgil is so much concerned to
+make this marriage (for he seems to be the father of the bride
+himself, and to give her to the bridegroom); it was to make way for
+the divorce which he intended afterwards, for he was a finer
+flatterer than Ovid, and I more than conjecture that he had in his
+eye the divorce which not long before had passed betwixt the emperor
+and Scribonia.  He drew this dimple in the cheek of AEneas to prove
+Augustus of the same family by so remarkable a feature in the same
+place.  Thus, as we say in our home-spun English proverb, he killed
+two birds with one stone--pleased the emperor by giving him the
+resemblance of his ancestor, and gave him such a resemblance as was
+not scandalous in that age (for to leave one wife and take another
+was but a matter of gallantry at that time of day among the Romans).
+Neque haec in faedera veni is the very excuse which AEneas makes
+when he leaves his lady.  "I made no such bargain with you at our
+marriage to live always drudging on at Carthage; my business was
+Italy, and I never made a secret of it.  If I took my pleasure, had
+not you your share of it?  I leave you free at my departure to
+comfort yourself with the next stranger who happens to be
+shipwrecked on your coast; be as kind an hostess as you have been to
+me, and you can never fail of another husband.  In the meantime I
+call the gods to witness that I leave your shore unwillingly; for
+though Juno made the marriage, yet Jupiter commands me to forsake
+you."  This is the effect of what he saith when it is dishonoured
+out of Latin verse into English prose.  If the poet argued not
+aright, we must pardon him for a poor blind heathen, who knew no
+better morals.
+
+I have detained your lordship longer than I intended on this
+objection, which would indeed weigh something in a Spiritual Court;-
+-but I am not to defend our poet there.  The next, I think, is but a
+cavil, though the cry is great against him, and hath continued from
+the time of Macrobius to this present age; I hinted it before.  They
+lay no less than want of invention to his charge--a capital charge,
+I must acknowledge; for a poet is a maker, as the word signifies;
+and who cannot make--that is, invent--hath his name for nothing.
+That which makes this accusation look so strong at the first sight
+is that he has borrowed so many things from Homer, Apollonius
+Rhodius, and others who preceded him.  But in the first place, if
+invention is to be taken in so strict a sense that the matter of a
+poem must be wholly new, and that in all its parts, then Scaliger
+hath made out, saith Segrais, that the history of Troy was no more
+the invention of Homer than of Virgil.  There was not an old woman
+or almost a child, but had it in their mouths before the Greek poet
+or his friends digested it into this admirable order in which we
+read it.  At this rate, as Solomon hath told us, there is nothing
+new beneath the sun.  Who, then, can pass for an inventor if Homer
+as well as Virgil must be deprived of that glory!  Is Versailles the
+less a new building because the architect of that palace hath
+imitated others which were built before it?  Walls, doors and
+windows, apartments, offices, rooms of convenience and magnificence,
+are in all great houses.  So descriptions, figures, fables, and the
+rest, must be in all heroic poems; they are the common materials of
+poetry, furnished from the magazine of nature:  every poet hath as
+much right to them as every man hath to air or water
+
+
+"Quid prohibetis aquas?  Usus communis aquarum est."
+
+
+But the argument of the work (that is to say, its principal action),
+the economy and disposition of it--these are the things which
+distinguish copies from originals.  The Poet who borrows nothing
+from others is yet to be born; he and the Jews' Messias will come
+together.  There are parts of the "AEneis" which resemble some parts
+both of the "Ilias" and of the "Odysses;" as, for example, AEneas
+descended into hell, and Ulysses had been there before him; AEneas
+loved Dido, and Ulysses loved Calypso:  in few words, Virgil hath
+imitated Homer's "Odysses" in his first six books, and in his six
+last the "Ilias."  But from hence can we infer that the two poets
+write the same history?  Is there no invention in some other parts
+of Virgil's "AEneis?"  The disposition of so many various matters,
+is not that his own?  From what book of Homer had Virgil his episode
+of Nysus and Euryalus, of Mezentius and Lausus?  From whence did he
+borrow his design of bringing AEneas into Italy? of establishing the
+Roman Empire on the foundations of a Trojan colony? to say nothing
+of the honour he did his patron, not only in his descent from Venus,
+but in making him so like her in his best features that the goddess
+might have mistaken Augustus for her son.  He had indeed the story
+from common fame, as Homer had his from the Egyptian priestess.
+AEneadum genetrix was no more unknown to Lucretius than to him; but
+Lucretius taught him not to form his hero, to give him piety or
+valour for his manners--and both in so eminent a degree that, having
+done what was possible for man to save his king and country, his
+mother was forced to appear to him and restrain his fury, which
+hurried him to death in their revenge.  But the poet made his piety
+more successful; he brought off his father and his son; and his gods
+witnessed to his devotion by putting themselves under his
+protection, to be replaced by him in their promised Italy.  Neither
+the invention nor the conduct of this great action were owing to
+Homer or any other poet; it is one thing to copy, and another thing
+to imitate from nature.  The copier is that servile imitator to whom
+Horace gives no better a name than that of animal; he will not so
+much as allow him to be a man.  Raffaelle imitated nature; they who
+copy one of Raffaelle's pieces, imitate but him, for his work is
+their original.  They translate him, as I do Virgil; and fall as
+short of him as I of Virgil.  There is a kind of invention in the
+imitation of Raffaelle; for though the thing was in nature, yet the
+idea of it was his own.  Ulysses travelled, so did AEneas; but
+neither of them were the first travellers:  for Cain went into the
+land of Nod before they were born, and neither of the poets ever
+heard of such a man.  If Ulysses had been killed at Troy, yet AEneas
+must have gone to sea, or he could never have arrived in Italy; but
+the designs of the two poets were as different as the courses of
+their heroes--one went home, and the other sought a home.
+
+To return to my first similitude.  Suppose Apelles and Raffaelle had
+each of them painted a burning Troy, might not the modern painter
+have succeeded as well as the ancient, though neither of them had
+seen the town on fire?  For the drafts of both were taken from the
+ideas which they had of nature.  Cities have been burnt before
+either of them were in being.  But to close the simile as I began
+it:  they would not have designed it after the same manner; Apelles
+would have distinguished Pyrrhus from the rest of all the Grecians,
+and showed him forcing his entrance into Priam's palace; there he
+had set him in the fairest light, and given him the chief place of
+all his figures, because he was a Grecian and he would do honour to
+his country.  Raffaelle, who was an Italian, and descended from the
+Trojans, would have made AEneas the hero of his piece, and perhaps
+not with his father on his back, his son in one hand, his bundle of
+gods in the other, and his wife following (for an act of piety is
+not half so graceful in a picture as an act of courage); he would
+rather have drawn him killing Androgeus or some other hand to hand,
+and the blaze of the fires should have darted full upon his face, to
+make him conspicuous amongst his Trojans.  This, I think, is a just
+comparison betwixt the two poets in the conduct of their several
+designs.  Virgil cannot be said to copy Homer; the Grecian had only
+the advantage of writing first.  If it be urged that I have granted
+a resemblance in some parts, yet therein Virgil has excelled him;
+for what are the tears of Calypso for being left, to the fury and
+death of Dido?  Where is there the whole process of her passion and
+all its violent effects to be found in the languishing episode of
+the "Odysses"?  If this be to copy, let the critics show us the same
+disposition, features, or colouring in their original.  The like may
+be said of the descent to hell, which was not of Homer's invention
+either; he had it from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.  But to
+what end did Ulysses make that journey?  AEneas undertook it by the
+express commandment of his father's ghost.  There he was to show him
+all the succeeding heroes of his race, and next to Romulus (mark, if
+you please the address of Virgil) his own patron, Augustus Caesar.
+Anchises was likewise to instruct him how to manage the Italian war,
+and how to conclude it with his honour--that is, in other words, to
+lay the foundations of that empire which Augustus was to govern.
+This is the noble invention of our author, but it hath been copied
+by so many sign-post daubers that now it is grown fulsome, rather by
+their want of skill than by the commonness.
+
+In the last place.  I may safely grant that by reading Homer, Virgil
+was taught to imitate his invention--that is to imitate like him
+(which is no more than if a painter studied Raffaelle that he might
+learn to design after his manner).  And thus I might imitate Virgil
+if I were capable of writing an heroic poem, and yet the invention
+be my own; but I should endeavour to avoid a servile copying.  I
+would not give the same story under other names, with the same
+characters, in the same order, and with the same sequel, for every
+common reader to find me out at the first sight for a plagiary, and
+cry, "This I read before in Virgil in a better language and in
+better verse."  This is like Merry-Andrew on the low rope copying
+lubberly the same tricks which his master is so dexterously
+performing on the high.
+
+I will trouble your lordship but with one objection more, which I
+know not whether I found in Le Febvre or Valois, but I am sure I
+have read it in another French critic, whom I will not name because
+I think it is not much for his reputation.  Virgil in the heat of
+action--suppose, for example, in describing the fury of his hero in
+a battle (when he is endeavouring to raise our concernments to the
+highest pitch)--turns short on the sudden into some similitude which
+diverts, say they, your attention from the main subject, and
+misspends it on some trivial image.  He pours cold water into the
+caldron when his business is to make it boil.
+
+This accusation is general against all who would be thought heroic
+poets, but I think it touches Virgil less than any; he is too great
+a master of his art to make a blot which may so easily be hit.
+Similitudes (as I have said) are not for tragedy, which is all
+violent, and where the passions are in a perpetual ferment; for
+there they deaden, where they should animate; they are not of the
+nature of dialogue unless in comedy.  A metaphor is almost all the
+stage can suffer, which is a kind of similitude comprehended in a
+word.  But this figure has a contrary effect in heroic poetry; there
+it is employed to raise the admiration, which is its proper
+business; and admiration is not of so violent a nature as fear or
+hope, compassion or horror, or any concernment we can have for such
+or such a person on the stage.  Not but I confess that similitudes
+and descriptions when drawn into an unreasonable length must needs
+nauseate the reader.  Once I remember (and but once) Virgil makes a
+similitude of fourteen lines, and his description of Fame is about
+the same number.  He is blamed for both, and I doubt not but he
+would have contracted them had be lived to have reviewed his work;
+but faults are no precedents.  This I have observed of his
+similitudes in general--that they are not placed (as our unobserving
+critics tell us) in the heat of any action, but commonly in its
+declining; when he has warmed us in his description as much as
+possibly he can, then (lest that warmth should languish) he renews
+it by some apt similitude which illustrates his subject and yet
+palls not his audience.  I need give your lordship but one example
+of this kind, and leave the rest to your observation when next you
+review the whole "AEneis" in the original, unblemished by my rude
+translation; it is in the first hook, where the poet describes
+Neptune composing the ocean, on which AEolus had raised a tempest
+without his permission.  He had already chidden the rebellious winds
+for obeying the commands of their usurping master; he had warned
+them from the seas; he had beaten down the billows with his mace;
+dispelled the clouds, restored the sunshine, while Triton and
+Cymothoe were heaving the ships from off the quicksands, before the
+poet would offer at a similitude for illustration
+
+
+"Ac, veluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est
+Seditio, saevitque animis ignobile vulgus;
+Jamque faces, et saxa volant; furor arma ministrat;
+Tum, pietate gravem ac meritis si forte virum quem
+Conspexere, silent, arrectisque auribus adstant:
+Ille regit dictis animos, et pectora mulcet:
+Sic cunctus pelagi cecidit fragor, aequora postquam
+Prospiciens genitor, coeloque invectus aperto
+Flectit equos, curruque volans dat lora secundo."
+
+
+This is the first similitude which Virgil makes in this poem, and
+one of the longest in the whole, for which reason I the rather cite
+it.  While the storm was in its fury, any allusion had been
+improper; for the poet could have compared it to nothing more
+impetuous than itself; consequently he could have made no
+illustration.  If he could have illustrated, it had been an
+ambitious ornament out of season, and would have diverted our
+concernment (nunc non erat his locus), and therefore he deferred it
+to its proper place.
+
+These are the criticisms of most moment which have been made against
+the "AEneis" by the ancients or moderns.  As for the particular
+exceptions against this or that passage, Macrobius and Pontanus have
+answered them already.  If I desired to appear more learned than I
+am, it had been as easy for me to have taken their objections and
+solutions as it is for a country parson to take the expositions of
+the Fathers out of Junius and Tremellius, or not to have named the
+authors from whence I had them; for so Ruaeus (otherwise a most
+judicious commentator on Virgil's works) has used Pontanus, his
+greatest benefactor, of whom he is very silent, and I do not
+remember that he once cites him.
+
+What follows next is no objection; for that implies a fault, and it
+had been none in Virgil if he had extended the time of his action
+beyond a year--at least, Aristotle has set no precise limits to it.
+Homer's, we know, was within two months; Tasso; I am sure, exceeds
+not a summer, and if I examined him perhaps he might be reduced into
+a much less compass.  Bossu leaves it doubtful whether Virgil's
+action were within the year, or took up some months beyond it.
+Indeed, the whole dispute is of no more concernment to the common
+reader than it is to a ploughman whether February this year had
+twenty-eight or twenty-nine days in it; but for the satisfaction of
+the more curious (of which number I am sure your lordship is one) I
+will translate what I think convenient out of Segrais, whom perhaps
+you have not read, for he has made it highly probable that the
+action of the "AEneis" began in the spring, and was not extended
+beyond the autumn; and we have known campaigns that have begun
+sooner and have ended later.
+
+Ronsard and the rest whom Segrais names, who are of opinion that the
+action of this poem takes up almost a year and half, ground their
+calculation thus:- Anchises died in Sicily at the end of winter or
+beginning of the spring.  AEneas, immediately after the interment of
+his father, puts to sea for Italy; he is surprised by the tempest
+described in the beginning of the first book; and there it is that
+the scene of the poem opens, and where the action must commence.  He
+is driven by this storm on the coasts of Africa; he stays at
+Carthage all that summer, and almost all the winter following; sets
+sail again for Italy just before the beginning of the spring; meets
+with contrary winds, and makes Sicily the second time.  This part of
+the action completes the year.  Then he celebrates the anniversary
+of his father's funerals, and shortly after arrives at Cumes.  And
+from thence his time is taken up in his first treaty with Latinus;
+the overture of the war; the siege of his camp by Turnus; his going
+for succours to relieve it; his return; the raising of the siege by
+the first battle; the twelve days' truce; the second battle; the
+assault of Laurentum, and the single fight with Turnus--all which,
+they say, cannot take up less than four or five months more, by
+which account we cannot suppose the entire action to be contained in
+a much less compass than a year and half.
+
+Segrais reckons another way, and his computation is not condemned by
+the learned Ruaeus, who compiled and published the commentaries on
+our poet which we call the "Dauphin's Virgil."  He allows the time
+of year when Anchises died to be in the latter end of winter or the
+beginning of the spring; he acknowledges that when AEneas is first
+seen at sea afterwards, and is driven by the tempest on the coast of
+Africa, is the time when the action is naturally to begin; he
+confesses farther, that AEneas left Carthage in the latter end of
+winter, for Dido tells him in express terms, as an argument for his
+longer stay -
+
+
+"Quin etiam hiberno moliris sidere classem."
+
+
+But whereas Ronsard's followers suppose that when AEneas had buried
+his father he set sail immediately for Italy (though the tempest
+drove him on the coast of Carthage), Segrais will by no means allow
+that supposition, but thinks it much more probable that he remained
+in Sicily till the midst of July or the beginning of August, at
+which time he places the first appearance of his hero on the sea,
+and there opens the action of the poem.  From which beginning, to
+the death of Turnus, which concludes the action, there need not be
+supposed above ten months of intermediate time; for arriving at
+Carthage in the latter end of summer, staying there the winter
+following, departing thence in the very beginning of the spring,
+making a short abode in Sicily the second time, landing in Italy,
+and making the war, may be reasonably judged the business but of ten
+months.  To this the Ronsardians reply that, having been for seven
+years before in quest of Italy, and having no more to do in Sicily
+than to inter his father--after that office was performed, what
+remained for him but without delay to pursue his first adventure?
+To which Segrais answers that the obsequies of his father, according
+to the rites of the Greeks and Romans, would detain him for many
+days; that a longer time must be taken up in the re-fitting of his
+ships after so tedious a voyage, and in refreshing his weather-
+beaten soldiers on a friendly coast.  These indeed are but
+suppositions on both sides, yet those of Segrais seem better
+grounded; for the feast of Dido, when she entertained AEneas first,
+has the appearance of a summer's night, which seems already almost
+ended, when he begins his story.  Therefore the love was made in
+autumn; the hunting followed properly, when the heats of that
+scorching country were declining.  The winter was passed in jollity,
+as the season and their love required; and he left her in the latter
+end of winter, as is already proved.  This opinion is fortified by
+the arrival of AEneas at the mouth of Tiber, which marks the season
+of the spring, that season being perfectly described by the singing
+of the birds saluting the dawn, and by the beauty of the place,
+which the poet seems to have painted expressly in the seventh
+AEneid:-
+
+
+"Aurora in roseis fulgebat lutea bigis,
+Cum venti posuere . . .
+. . . variae circumque supraque
+Assuetae ripis volucres, et fluminis alveo,
+AEthera mulcebant cantu."
+
+
+The remainder of the action required but three months more; for when
+AEneas went for succour to the Tuscans, he found their army in a
+readiness to march and wanting only a commander:  so that, according
+to this calculation, the "AEneas" takes not up above a year
+complete, and may be comprehended in less compass.
+
+This, amongst other circumstances treated more at large by Segrais,
+agrees with the rising of Orion, which caused the tempest described
+in the beginning of the first book.  By some passages in the
+"Pastorals," but more particularly in the "Georgics," our poet is
+found to be an exact astronomer, according to the knowledge of that
+age.  Now Ilioneus, whom Virgil twice employs in embassies as the
+best speaker of the Trojans, attributes that tempest to Orion in his
+speech to Dido:-
+
+
+"Cum subito assurgens fluctu nimbosus Orion."
+
+
+He must mean either the heliacal or achronical rising of that sign.
+The heliacal rising of a constellation is when it comes from under
+the rays of the sun, and begins to appear before daylight.  The
+achronical rising, on the contrary, is when it appears at the close
+of day, and in opposition of the sun's diurnal course.  The heliacal
+rising of Orion is at present computed to be about the 6th of July;
+and about that time it is that he either causes or presages tempests
+on the seas.
+
+Segrais has observed farther, that when Anna counsels Dido to stay
+AEneas during the winter, she speaks also of Orion:-
+
+
+"Dum pelago desaevit hiems, et aquosus Orion."
+
+
+If therefore Ilioneus, according to our supposition, understand the
+heliacal rising of Orion, Anna must mean the achronical, which the
+different epithets given to that constellation seem to manifest.
+Ilioneus calls him nimbosus, Anna, aquosus.  He is tempestuous in
+the summer, when he rises heliacally; and rainy in the winter, when
+he rises achronically.  Your lordship will pardon me for the
+frequent repetition of these cant words, which I could not avoid in
+this abbreviation of Segrais, who, I think, deserves no little
+commendation in this new criticism.
+
+I have yet a word or two to say of Virgil's machines, from my own
+observation of them.  He has imitated those of Homer, but not copied
+them.  It was established long before this time, in the Roman
+religion as well as in the Greek, that there were gods, and both
+nations for the most part worshipped the same deities, as did also
+the Trojans (from whom the Romans, I suppose, would rather be
+thought to derive the rites of their religion than from the
+Grecians, because they thought themselves descended from them).
+Each of those gods had his proper office, and the chief of them
+their particular attendants.  Thus Jupiter had in propriety Ganymede
+and Mercury, and Juno had Iris.  It was not for Virgil, then, to
+Create new ministers; he must take what he found in his religion.
+It cannot therefore be said that he borrowed them from Homer, any
+more than from Apollo, Diana, and the rest, whom he uses as he finds
+occasion for them, as the Grecian poet did; but he invents the
+occasions for which he uses them.  Venus, after the destruction of
+Troy, had gained Neptune entirely to her party; therefore we find
+him busy in the beginning of the "AEneis" to calm the tempest raised
+by AEolus, and afterwards conducting the Trojan fleet to Cumes in
+safety, with the loss only of their pilot, for whom he bargains.  I
+name those two examples--amongst a hundred which I omit--to prove
+that Virgil, generally speaking, employed his machines in performing
+those things which might possibly have been done without them.  What
+more frequent than a storm at sea upon the rising of Orion?  What
+wonder if amongst so many ships there should one be overset, which
+was commanded by Orontes, though half the winds had not been there
+which AEolus employed?  Might not Palinurus, without a miracle, fall
+asleep and drop into the sea, having been over-wearied with
+watching, and secure of a quiet passage by his observation of the
+skies?  At least AEneas, who knew nothing of the machine of Somnus,
+takes it plainly in this sense:-
+
+
+"O nimium coelo et pelago confise sereno,
+Nudus in ignota, Palinure, jacebis arena."
+
+
+But machines sometimes are specious things to amuse the reader, and
+give a colour of probability to things otherwise incredible; and,
+besides, it soothed the vanity of the Romans to find the gods so
+visibly concerned in all the actions of their predecessors.  We who
+are better taught by our religion, yet own every wonderful accident
+which befalls us for the best, to be brought to pass by some special
+providence of Almighty God, and by the care of guardian angels; and
+from hence I might infer that no heroic poem can be writ on the
+Epicurean principles, which I could easily demonstrate if there were
+need to prove it or I had leisure.
+
+When Venus opens the eyes of her son AEneas to behold the gods who
+combated against Troy in that fatal night when it was surprised, we
+share the pleasure of that glorious vision (which Tasso has not ill
+copied in the sacking of Jerusalem).  But the Greeks had done their
+business though neither Neptune, Juno, or Pallas had given them
+their divine assistance.  The most crude machine which Virgil uses
+is in the episode of Camilla, where Opis by the command of her
+mistress kills Aruns.  The next is in the twelfth AEneid, where
+Venus cures her son AEneas.  But in the last of these the poet was
+driven to a necessity, for Turnus was to be slain that very day; and
+AEneas, wounded as he was, could not have engaged him in single
+combat unless his hurt had been miraculously healed and the poet had
+considered that the dittany which she brought from Crete could not
+have wrought so speedy an effect without the juice of ambrosia which
+she mingled with it.  After all, that his machine might not seem too
+violent, we see the hero limping after Turnus; the wound was
+skinned, but the strength of his thigh was not restored.  But what
+reason had our author to wound AEneas at so critical a time?  And
+how came the cuishes to be worse tempered than the rest of his
+armour, which was all wrought by Vulcan and his journeymen?  These
+difficulties are not easily to be solved without confessing that
+Virgil had not life enough to correct his work, though he had
+reviewed it and found those errors, which he resolved to mend; but
+being prevented by death, and not willing to leave an imperfect work
+behind him, he ordained by his last testament that his "AEneis"
+should be burned.  As for the death of Aruns, who was shot by a
+goddess, the machine was not altogether so outrageous as the
+wounding Mars and Venus by the sword of Diomede.  Two divinities,
+one would have thought, might have pleaded their prerogative of
+impassibility, or at least not have been wounded by any mortal hand.
+Beside that, the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] which they
+shed was so very like our common blood that it was not to be
+distinguished from it but only by the name and colour.  As for what
+Horace says in his "Art of Poetry," that no machines are to be used
+unless on some extraordinary occasion--
+
+
+"Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus" -
+
+
+that rule is to be applied to the theatre, of which he is then
+speaking, and means no more than this--that when the knot of the
+play is to be untied, and no other way is left for making the
+discovery, then, and not otherwise, let a god descend upon a rope,
+and clear the business to the audience.  But this has no relation to
+the machines which are used in an epic poem.
+
+In the last place, for the dira, or flying pest which, flapping on
+the shield of Turnus and fluttering about his head, disheartened him
+in the duel, and presaged to him his approaching death--I might have
+placed it more properly amongst the objections, for the critics who
+lay want of courage to the charge of Virgil's hero quote this
+passage as a main proof of their assertion.  They say our author had
+not only secured him before the duel, but also in the beginning of
+it had given him the advantage in impenetrable arms and in his
+sword; for that of Turnus was not his own (which was forged by
+Vulcan for his father), but a weapon which he had snatched in haste,
+and by mistake, belonging to his charioteer Metiscus.  That after
+all this Jupiter, who was partial to the Trojan, and distrustful of
+the event, though he had hung the balance and given it a jog of his
+hand to weigh down Turnus, thought convenient to give the Fates a
+collateral security by sending the screech-owl to discourage him;
+for which they quote these words of Virgil:-
+
+
+"Non me tua turbida virtus
+Terret, ait; dii me terrent, et Jupiter hostis."
+
+
+In answer to which, I say that this machine is one of those which
+the poet uses only for ornament, and not out of necessity.  Nothing
+can be more beautiful or more poetical than his description of the
+three Dirae, or the setting of the balance, which our Milton has
+borrowed from him, but employed to a different end; for, first, he
+makes God Almighty set the scales for St. Gabriel and Satan, when he
+knew no combat was to follow; then he makes the good angel's scale
+descend, and the devil's mount--quite contrary to Virgil, if I have
+translated the three verses according to my author's sense:-
+
+
+"Jupiter ipse duas aequota examine lances
+Sustinet, et fata imponit diversa duorum;
+Quem damnet labor, et quo vergat pondere letum."
+
+
+For I have taken these words Quem damnet labor in the sense which
+Virgil gives them in another place (Damnabis tu quoque votis), to
+signify a prosperous event.  Yet I dare not condemn so great a
+genius as Milton; for I am much mistaken if he alludes not to the
+text in Daniel where Belshazzar was put into the balance and found
+too light.  This is digression, and I return to my subject.  I said
+above that these two machines of the balance and the Dira were only
+ornamental, and that the success of the duel had been the same
+without them; for when AEneas and Turnus stood fronting each other
+before the altar, Turnus looked dejected, and his colour faded in
+his face, as if he desponded of the victory before the fight; and
+not only he, but all his party, when the strength of the two
+champions was judged by the proportion of their limbs, concluded it
+was impar pugna, and that their chief was overmatched.  Whereupon
+Juturna, who was of the same opinion, took this opportunity to break
+the treaty and renew the war.  Juno herself had plainly told the
+nymph beforehand that her brother was to fight
+
+
+"Imparibus fatis; nec diis, nec viribus aequis;"
+
+
+so that there was no need of an apparition to fright Turnus, he had
+the presage within himself of his impending destiny.  The Dira only
+served to confirm him in his first opinion, that it was his destiny
+to die in the ensuing combat.  And in this sense are those words of
+Virgil to be taken -
+
+
+"Non me tua turbida virtus
+Terret, ait; dii me terrent, et Jupiter hostis."
+
+
+I doubt not but the adverb solum is to be understood ("It is not
+your valour only that gives me this concernment, but I find also by
+this portent that Jupiter is my enemy"); for Turnus fled before,
+when his first sword was broken, till his sister supplied him with a
+better, which indeed he could not use because AEneas kept him at a
+distance with his spear.  I wonder Ruaeus saw not this, where he
+charges his author so unjustly for giving Turnus a second sword to
+no purpose.  How could he fasten a blow or make a thrust, when he
+was not suffered to approach?  Besides, the chief errand of the Dira
+was to warn Juturna from the field, for she could have brought the
+chariot again when she saw her brother worsted in the duel.  I might
+farther add that AEneas was so eager of the fight that he left the
+city, now almost in his possession, to decide his quarrel with
+Turnus by the sword; whereas Turnus had manifestly declined the
+combat, and suffered his sister to convey him as far from the reach
+of his enemy as she could.  I say, not only suffered her, but
+consented to it; for it is plain he knew her by these words:-
+
+
+"O soror, et dudum agnovi, cum prima per artem
+Faedera turbasti, teque haec in bella dedisti;
+Et tunc necquicquam fallis dea."
+
+
+I have dwelt so long on this subject that I must contract what I
+have to say in reference to my translation, unless I would swell my
+preface into a volume, and make it formidable to your lordship, when
+you see so many pages yet behind.  And, indeed, what I have already
+written, either in justification or praise of Virgil, is against
+myself for presuming to copy in my coarse English the thoughts and
+beautiful expressions of this inimitable poet, who flourished in an
+age when his language was brought to its last perfection, for which
+it was particularly owing to him and Horace.  I will give your
+lordship my opinion that those two friends had consulted each
+other's judgment wherein they should endeavour to excel; and they
+seem to have pitched on propriety of thought, elegance of words, and
+harmony of numbers.  According to this model, Horace wrote his odes
+and epodes; for his satires and epistles, being intended wholly for
+instruction, required another style -
+
+
+"Ornari res ipsa negat, contenta doceri" -
+
+
+and therefore, as he himself professes, are sermoni propriora
+(nearer prose than verse).  But Virgil, who never attempted the
+lyric verse, is everywhere elegant, sweet, and flowing in his
+hexameters.  His words are not only chosen, but the places in which
+he ranks them for the sound; he who removes them from the station
+wherein their master sets them spoils the harmony.  What he says of
+the Sibyl's prophecies may be as properly applied to every word of
+his--they must be read in order as they lie; the least breath
+discomposes them, and somewhat of their divinity is lost.  I cannot
+boast that I have been thus exact in my verses; but I have
+endeavoured to follow the example of my master, and am the first
+Englishman perhaps who made it his design to copy him in his
+numbers, his choice of words, and his placing them for the sweetness
+of the sound.  On this last consideration I have shunned the caesura
+as much as possibly I could; for wherever that is used, it gives a
+roughness to the verse, of which we can have little need in a
+language which is overstocked with consonants.  Such is not the
+Latin where the vowels and consonants are mixed in proportion to
+each other; yet Virgil judged the vowels to have somewhat of an
+over-balance, and therefore tempers their sweetness with caesuras.
+Such difference there is in tongues that the same figure which
+roughens one, gives majesty to another; and that was it which Virgil
+studied in his verses.  Ovid uses it but rarely; and hence it is
+that his versification cannot so properly be called sweet as
+luscious.  The Italians are forced upon it once or twice in every
+line, because they have a redundancy of vowels in their language;
+their metal is so soft that it will not coin without alloy to harden
+it.  On the other side, for the reason already named, it is all we
+can do to give sufficient sweetness to our language; we must not
+only choose our words for elegance, but for sound--to perform which
+a mastery in the language is required; the poet must have a magazine
+of words, and have the art to manage his few vowels to the best
+advantage, that they may go the farther.  He must also know the
+nature of the vowels--which are more sonorous, and which more soft
+and sweet--and so dispose them as his present occasions require; all
+which, and a thousand secrets of versification beside, he may learn
+from Virgil, if he will take him for his guide.  If he be above
+Virgil, and is resolved to follow his own verve (as the French call
+it), the proverb will fall heavily upon him:  "Who teaches himself
+has a fool for his master."
+
+Virgil employed eleven years upon his "AEneis," yet he left it, as
+he thought himself, imperfect; which, when I seriously consider, I
+wish that, instead of three years which I have spent in the
+translation of his works, I had four years more allowed me to
+correct my errors, that I might make my version somewhat more
+tolerable than it is; for a poet cannot have too great a reverence
+for his readers if he expects his labours should survive him.  Yet I
+will neither plead my age nor sickness in excuse of the faults which
+I have made.  That I wanted time is all I have to say; for some of
+my subscribers grew so clamorous that I could no longer defer the
+publication.  I hope, from the candour of your lordship, and your
+often-experienced goodness to me, that if the faults are not too
+many you will make allowances, with Horace:-
+
+
+"Si plura nitent in carmine, non ego paucis
+Offendar maculis, quas aut incuria fudit,
+Aut humana parum cavit natura."
+
+
+You may please also to observe that there is not, to the best of my
+remembrance, one vowel gaping on another for want of a caesura in
+this whole poem.  But where a vowel ends a word the next begins
+either with a consonant or what is its equivalent; for our w and h
+aspirate, and our diphthongs, are plainly such.  The greatest
+latitude I take is in the letter y when it concludes a word and the
+first syllable of the next begins with a vowel.  Neither need I have
+called this a latitude, which is only an explanation of this general
+rule--that no vowel can be cut off before another when we cannot
+sink the pronunciation of it, as he, she, me, I, &c.  Virgil thinks
+it sometimes a beauty to imitate the licence of the Greeks, and
+leave two vowels opening on each other, as in that verse of the
+third pastoral--
+
+
+"Et succus pecori, et lac subducitur agnis."
+
+
+But nobis non licet esse tam disertis--at least, if we study to
+refine our numbers.  I have long had by me the materials of an
+English "Prosodia," containing all the mechanical rules of
+versification, wherein I have treated with some exactness of the
+feet, the quantities, and the pauses.  The French and Italians know
+nothing of the two first--at least, their best poets have not
+practised them.  As for the pauses, Malherbe first brought them into
+France within this last century, and we see how they adorn their
+Alexandrines.  But as Virgil propounds a riddle which he leaves
+unsolved -
+
+
+"Dic quibus in terris, inscripti nomina regum
+Nascantur flores, et Phyllida solus habeto" -
+
+
+so I will give your lordship another, and leave the exposition of it
+to your acute judgment.  I am sure there are few who make verses
+have observed the sweetness of these two lines in "Cooper's Hill" -
+
+
+"Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
+Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full" -
+
+
+and there are yet fewer who can find the reason of that sweetness.
+I have given it to some of my friends in conversation, and they have
+allowed the criticism to be just.  But since the evil of false
+quantities is difficult to be cured in any modern language; since
+the French and the Italians, as well as we, are yet ignorant what
+feet are to be used in heroic poetry; since I have not strictly
+observed those rules myself which I can teach others; since I
+pretend to no dictatorship among my fellow-poets; since, if I should
+instruct some of them to make well-running verses, they want genius
+to give them strength as well as sweetness; and, above all, since
+your lordship has advised me not to publish that little which I
+know, I look on your counsel as your command, which I shall observe
+inviolably till you shall please to revoke it and leave me at
+liberty to make my thoughts public.  In the meantime, that I may
+arrogate nothing to myself, I must acknowledge that Virgil in Latin
+and Spenser in English have been my masters.  Spenser has also given
+me the boldness to make use sometimes of his Alexandrine line, which
+we call, though improperly, the Pindaric, because Mr. Cowley has
+often employed it in his odes.  It adds a certain majesty to the
+verse when it is used with judgment, and stops the sense from
+overflowing into another line.  Formerly the French, like us and the
+Italians, had but five feet or ten syllables in their heroic verse;
+but since Ronsard's time, as I suppose, they found their tongue too
+weak to support their epic poetry without the addition of another
+foot.  That indeed has given it somewhat of the run and measure of a
+trimetre, but it runs with more activity than strength.  Their
+language is not strong with sinews, like our English; it has the
+nimbleness of a greyhound, but not the bulk and body of a mastiff.
+Our men and our verses overbear them by their weight; and pondere,
+non numero is the British motto.  The French have set up purity for
+the standard of their language; and a masculine vigour is that of
+ours.  Like their tongue is the genius of their poets, light and
+trifling in comparison of the English--more proper for sonnets,
+madrigals, and elegies than heroic poetry.  The turn on thoughts and
+words is their chief talent:  but the epic poem is too stately to
+receive those little ornaments.  The painters draw their nymphs in
+thin and airy habits, but the weight of gold and of embroideries is
+reserved for queens and goddesses.  Virgil is never frequent in
+those turns, like Ovid, but much more sparing of them in his
+"AEneis" than in his Pastorals and Georgics.
+
+
+"Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere manes."
+
+
+That turn is beautiful indeed; but he employs it in the story of
+Orpheus and Eurydice, not in his great poem.  I have used that
+licence in his "AEneis" sometimes, but I own it as my fault; it was
+given to those who understand no better.  It is like Ovid's
+
+
+"Semivirumque bovem, semibovemque virum."
+
+
+The poet found it before his critics, but it was a darling sin which
+he would not be persuaded to reform.
+
+The want of genius, of which I have accused the French, is laid to
+their charge by one of their own great authors, though I have
+forgotten his name, and where I read it.  If rewards could make good
+poets, their great master has not been wanting on his part in his
+bountiful encouragements; for he is wise enough to imitate Augustus
+if he had a Maro.  The Triumvir and Proscriber had descended to us
+in a more hideous form than they now appear, if the emperor had not
+taken care to make friends of him and Horace.  I confess the
+banishment of Ovid was a blot in his escutcheon; yet he was only
+banished, and who knows but his crime was capital?  And then his
+exile was a favour.  Ariosto, who, with all his faults, must be
+acknowledged a great poet, has put these words into the mouth of an
+Evangelist; but whether they will pass for gospel now I cannot
+tell:-
+
+
+"Non fu si santo ni benigno Augusto,
+Come la tuba di Virgilio suona;
+L'haver havuto in poesia buon gusto,
+La proscrittione iniqua gli pardona."
+
+
+But heroic poetry is not of the growth of France, as it might be of
+England if it were cultivated.  Spenser wanted only to have read the
+rules of Bossu, for no man was ever born with a greater genius or
+had more knowledge to support it.  But the performance of the French
+is not equal to their skill; and hitherto we have wanted skill to
+perform better.  Segrais, whose preface is so wonderfully good, yet
+is wholly destitute of elevation; though his version is much better
+than that of the two brothers, or any of the rest who have attempted
+Virgil.  Annibale Caro is a great name amongst the Italians, yet his
+translation of the "AEneis" is most scandalously mean, though he has
+taken the advantage of writing in blank verse, and freed himself
+from the shackles of modern rhyme--if it be modern; for Le Clerc has
+told us lately, and I believe has made it out, that David's Psalms
+were written in as errant rhyme as they are translated.  Now if a
+Muse cannot run when she is unfettered, it is a sign she has but
+little speed.  I will not make a digression here, though I am
+strangely tempted to it, but will only say that he who can write
+well in rhyme may write better in blank verse.  Rhyme is certainly a
+constraint even to the best poets, and those who make it with most
+ease; though perhaps I have as little reason to complain of that
+hardship as any man, excepting Quarles and Withers.  What it adds to
+sweetness, it takes away from sense; and he who loses the least by
+it may be called a gainer; it often makes us swerve from an author's
+meaning.  As if a mark he set up for an archer at a great distance,
+let him aim as exactly as he can, the least wind will take his arrow
+and divert it from the white.
+
+I return to our Italian translator of the "AEneis;" he is a foot-
+poet; he lackeys by the side of Virgil at the best, but never mounts
+behind him.  Doctor Morelli, who is no mean critic in our poetry,
+and therefore may be presumed to be a better in his own language,
+has confirmed me in this opinion by his judgment, and thinks withal
+that he has often mistaken his master's sense.  I would say so if I
+durst, but am afraid I have committed the same fault more often and
+more grossly; for I have forsaken Ruaeus (whom generally I follow)
+in many places, and made expositions of my own in some, quite
+contrary to him, of which I will give but two examples, because they
+are so near each other in the tenth AEneid:-
+
+
+"Sorti pater aequus utrique."
+
+
+Pallas says it to Turnus just before they fight.  Ruaeus thinks that
+the word pater is to be referred to Evander, the father of Pallas;
+but how could he imagine that it was the same thing to Evander if
+his son were slain, or if he overcame?  The poet certainly intended
+Jupiter, the common father of mankind, who, as Pallas hoped, would
+stand an impartial spectator of the combat, and not be more
+favourable to Turnus than to him.  The second is not long after it,
+and both before the duel is begun.  They are the words of Jupiter,
+who comforts Hercules for the death of Pallas, which was immediately
+to ensue, and which Hercules could not hinder, though the young hero
+had addressed his prayers to him for his assistance, because the
+gods cannot control destiny.  The verse follows -
+
+
+"Sic ait; atque oculos Rutulorum rejicit arvis" -
+
+
+which the same Ruaeus thus construes:  "Jupiter, after he had said
+this, immediately turns his eyes to the Rutulian fields and beholds
+the duel."  I have given this place another exposition--that he
+turned his eyes from the field of combat that he might not behold a
+sight so unpleasing to him.  The word rejicit, I know, will admit of
+both senses; but Jupiter having confessed that he could not alter
+fate, and being grieved he could not in consideration of Hercules,
+it seems to me that he should avert his eyes rather than take
+pleasure in the spectacle.  But of this I am not so confident as the
+other, though I think I have followed Virgil's sense.
+
+What I have said, though it has the face of arrogance, yet is
+intended for the honour of my country, and therefore I will boldly
+own that this English translation has more of Virgil's spirit in it
+than either the French or the Italian.  Some of our countrymen have
+translated episodes and other parts of Virgil with great success; as
+particularly your lordship, whose version of Orpheus and Eurydice is
+eminently good.  Amongst the dead authors, the Silenus of my Lord
+Rescommon cannot be too much commended.  I say nothing of Sir John
+Denham, Mr. Waller, and Mr. Cowley; it is the utmost of my ambition
+to be thought their equal, or not to be much inferior to them and
+some others of the living.  But it is one thing to take pains on a
+fragment and translate it perfectly, and another thing to have the
+weight of a whole author on my shoulders.  They who believe the
+burden light, let them attempt the fourth, sixth, or eighth
+Pastoral; the first or fourth Georgic; and, amongst the AEneids, the
+fourth, the fifth, the seventh, the ninth, the tenth, the eleventh,
+or the twelfth, for in these I think I have succeeded best.
+
+Long before I undertook this work I was no stranger to the original.
+I had also studied Virgil's design, his disposition of it, his
+manners, his judicious management of the figures, the sober
+retrenchments of his sense, which always leaves somewhat to gratify
+our imagination, on which it may enlarge at pleasure; but, above
+all, the elegance of his expressions and the harmony of his numbers.
+For, as I have said in a former dissertation, the words are in
+poetry what the colours are in painting.  If the design be good, and
+the draft be true, the colouring is the first beauty that strikes
+the eye.  Spenser and Milton are the nearest in English to Virgil
+and Horace in the Latin, and I have endeavoured to form my style by
+imitating their masters.  I will farther own to you, my lord, that
+my chief ambition is to please those readers who have discernment
+enough to prefer Virgil before any other poet in the Latin tongue.
+Such spirits as he desired to please, such would I choose for my
+judges, and would stand or fall by them alone.  Segrais has
+distinguished the readers of poetry, according to their capacity of
+judging, into three classes (he might have said the same of writers,
+too, if he had pleased).  In the lowest form he places those whom he
+calls les petits esprits--such things as are our upper-gallery
+audience in a playhouse, who like nothing but the husk and rind of
+wit; prefer a quibble, a conceit, an epigram, before solid sense and
+elegant expression.  These are mob-readers.  If Virgil and Martial
+steed for Parliament-men, we know already who would carry it.  But
+though they make the greatest appearance in the field, and cry the
+loudest, the best of it is they are but a sort of French Huguenots,
+or Dutch boors, brought ever in herds, but not naturalised, who have
+not land of two pounds per annum in Parnassus, and therefore are not
+privileged to poll.  Their authors are of the same level; fit to
+represent them on a mountebank's stage, or to be masters of the
+ceremonies in a bear-garden.  Yet these are they who have the most
+admirers.  But it often happens, to their mortification, that as
+their readers improve their stock of sense (as they may by reading
+better books, and by conversation with men of judgment), they soon
+forsake them; and when the torrent from the mountains falls no more,
+the swelling writer is reduced into his shallow bed, like the
+Mancanares at Madrid, with scarce water to moisten his own pebbles.
+There are a middle sort of readers (as we held there is a middle
+state of souls), such as have a farther insight than the former, yet
+have not the capacity of judging right; for I speak not of those who
+are bribed by a party, and knew better if they were not corrupted,
+but I mean a company of warm young men, who are not yet arrived so
+far as to discern the difference betwixt fustian or ostentations
+sentences and the true sublime.  These are above liking Martial or
+Owen's epigrams, but they would certainly set Virgil below Statius
+or Lucan.  I need not say their poets are of the same paste with
+their admirers.  They affect greatness in all they write, but it is
+a bladdered greatness, like that of the vain man whom Seneca
+describes an ill habit of body, full of humours, and swelled with
+dropsy.  Even these, too, desert their authors as their judgment
+ripens.  The young gentlemen themselves are commonly misled by their
+pedagogue at school, their tutor at the university, or their
+governor in their travels, and many of these three sorts are the
+most positive blockheads in the world.  How many of these flatulent
+writers have I known who have sunk in their reputation after seven
+or eight editions of their works! for indeed they are poets only for
+young men.  They had great success at their first appearance, but
+not being of God, as a wit said formerly, they could not stand.
+
+I have already named two sorts of judges, but Virgil wrote for
+neither of them, and by his example I am not ambitious of pleasing
+the lowest or the middle form of readers.  He chose to please the
+most judicious souls, of the highest rank and truest understanding.
+These are few in number; but whoever is so happy as to gain their
+approbation can never lose it, because they never give it blindly.
+Then they have a certain magnetism in their judgment which attracts
+others to their sense.  Every day they gain some new proselyte, and
+in time become the Church.  For this reason a well-weighed judicious
+poem, which at its first appearance gains no more upon the world
+than to be just received, and rather not blamed than much applauded,
+insinuates itself by insensible degrees into the liking of the
+reader; the more he studies it, the more it grows upon him, every
+time he takes it up he discovers some new graces in it.  And whereas
+poems which are produced by the vigour of imagination only have a
+gloss upon them at the first (which time wears off), the works of
+judgment are like the diamond, the more they are polished the more
+lustre they receive.  Such is the difference betwixt Virgil's
+"AEneis" and Marini's "Adone."  And if I may be allowed to change
+the metaphor, I would say that Virgil is like the Fame which he
+describes:-
+
+
+"Mobilitate viget, viresque acquirit eundo."
+
+
+Such a sort of reputation is my aim, though in a far inferior
+degree, according to my motto in the title-page--sequiturque patrem
+non passibus aequis--and therefore I appeal to the highest court of
+judicature, like that of the peers, of which your lordship is so
+great an ornament.
+
+Without this ambition which I own, of desiring to please the judices
+natos, I could never have been able to have done anything at this
+age, when the fire of poetry is commonly extinguished in other men.
+Yet Virgil has given me the example of Entellus for my
+encouragement; when he was well heated, the younger champion could
+not stand before him.  And we find the elder contended not for the
+gift, but for the honour (nec dona moror); for Dampier has informed
+us in his "Voyages" that the air of the country which produces gold
+is never wholesome.
+
+I had long since considered that the way to please the best judges
+is not to translate a poet literally, and Virgil least of any other;
+for his peculiar beauty lying in his choice of words, I am excluded
+from it by the narrow compass of our heroic verse, unless I would
+make use of monosyllables only, and these clogged with consonants,
+which are the dead weight of our mother tongue.  It is possible, I
+confess, though it rarely happens, that a verse of monosyllables may
+sound harmoniously; and some examples of it I have seen.  My first
+line of the "AEneis" is not harsh -
+
+
+"Arms, and the man I sing, who forced by Fate," &c. -
+
+
+but a much better instance may be given from the last line of
+Manilius, made English by our learned and judicious Mr. Creech -
+
+
+"Nor could the world have borne so fierce a flame" -
+
+
+where the many liquid consonants are placed so artfully that they
+give a pleasing sound to the words, though they are all of one
+syllable.  It is true, I have been sometimes forced upon it in other
+places of this work, but I never did it out of choice:  I was either
+in haste, or Virgil gave me no occasion for the ornament of words;
+for it seldom happens but a monosyllable line turns verse to prose,
+and even that prose is rugged and unharmonious.  Philarchus, I
+remember, taxes Balzac for placing twenty monosyllables in file
+without one dissyllable betwixt them.
+
+The way I have taken is not so strait as metaphrase, nor so loose as
+paraphrase; some things, too, I have omitted, and sometimes have
+added of my own.  Yet the omissions, I hope, are but of
+circumstances, and such as would have no grace in English; and the
+additions, I also hope, are easily deduced from Virgil's sense.
+They will seem (at least, I have the vanity to think so), not stuck
+into him, but growing out of him.  He studies brevity more than any
+other poet; but he had the advantage of a language wherein much may
+be comprehended in a little space.  We and all the modern tongues
+have more articles and pronouns, besides signs of tenses and cases,
+and other barbarities on which our speech is built, by the faults of
+our forefathers.  The Romans founded theirs upon the Greek; and the
+Greeks, we know, were labouring many hundred years upon their
+language before they brought it to perfection.  They rejected all
+those signs, and cut off as many articles as they could spare,
+comprehending in one word what we are constrained to express in two;
+which is one reason why we cannot write so concisely as they have
+done.  The word pater, for example, signifies not only "a father,"
+but "your father," "my father," "his or her father"--all included in
+a word.
+
+This inconvenience is common to all modern tongues, and this alone
+constrains us to employ more words than the ancients needed.  But
+having before observed that Virgil endeavours to be short, and at
+the same time elegant, I pursue the excellence and forsake the
+brevity.  For there he is like ambergris, a rich perfume, but of so
+close and glutinous a body that it must be opened with inferior
+scents of musk or civet, or the sweetness will not be drawn out into
+another language.
+
+On the whole matter I thought fit to steer betwixt the two extremes
+of paraphrase and literal translation; to keep as near my author as
+I could without losing all his graces, the most eminent of which are
+in the beauty of his words:  and those words, I must add, are always
+figurative.  Such of these as would retain their elegance in our
+tongue, I have endeavoured to graff on it; but most of them are of
+necessity to be lest, because they will not shine in any but their
+own.  Virgil has sometimes two of them in a line; but the scantiness
+of our heroic verse is not capable of receiving more than one; and
+that, too, must expiate for many others which have none.  Such is
+the difference of the languages, or such my want of skill in
+choosing words.  Yet I may presume to say, and I hope with as much
+reason as the French translator, that, taking all the materials of
+this divine author, I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such
+English as he would himself have spoken if he had been born in
+England and in this present age.  I acknowledge, with Segrais, that
+I have not succeeded in this attempt according to my desire; yet I
+shall not be wholly without praise, if in some sort I may be allowed
+to have copied the clearness, the purity, the easiness, and the
+magnificence of his style.  But I shall have occasion to speak
+farther on this subject before I end the preface.
+
+When I mentioned the Pindaric line, I should have added that I take
+another licence in my verses; for I frequently make use of triplet
+rhymes, and for the same reason--because they bound the sense.  And
+therefore I generally join these two licences together, and make the
+last verse of the triplet a Pindaric; for besides the majesty which
+it gives, it confines the sense within the barriers of three lines,
+which would languish if it were lengthened into four.  Spenser is my
+example for both these privileges of English verses; and Chapman has
+followed him in his translation of Homer.  Mr. Cowley has given in
+to them after both; and all succeeding writers after him.  I regard
+them now as the Magna Charta of heroic poetry; and am too much an
+Englishman to lose what my ancestors have gained for me.  Let the
+French and Italians value themselves on their regularity; strength
+and elevation are our standard.  I said before, and I repeat it,
+that the affected purity of the French has unsinewed their heroic
+verse.  The language of an epic poem is almost wholly figurative;
+yet they are so fearful of a metaphor that no example of Virgil can
+encourage them to be bold with safety.  Sure, they might warm
+themselves by that sprightly blaze, without approaching it so close
+as to singe their wings; they may come as near it as their master.
+Not that I would discourage that purity of diction in which he
+excels all other poets; but he knows how far to extend his
+franchises, and advances to the verge without venturing a foot
+beyond it.  On the other side, without being injurious to the memory
+of our English Pindar, I will presume to say that his metaphors are
+sometimes too violent, and his language is not always pure.  But at
+the same time I must excuse him, for through the iniquity of the
+times he was forced to travel at an age when, instead of learning
+foreign languages, he should have studied the beauties of his mother
+tongue, which, like all other speeches, is to be cultivated early,
+or we shall never write it with any kind of elegance.  Thus by
+gaining abroad he lost at home, like the painter in the "Arcadia,"
+who, going to see a skirmish, had his arms lopped off, and returned,
+says Sir Philip Sidney, well instructed how to draw a battle, but
+without a hand to perform his work.
+
+There is another thing in which I have presumed to deviate from him
+and Spenser.  They both make hemistichs, or half-verses, breaking
+off in the middle of a line.  I confess there are not many such in
+the "Faerie Queen," and even those few might be occasioned by his
+unhappy choice of so long a stanza.  Mr. Cowley had found out that
+no kind of staff is proper for an heroic poem, as being all too
+lyrical; yet though he wrote in couplets, where rhyme is freer from
+constraint, he frequently affects half-verses, of which we find not
+one in Homer, and I think not in any of the Greek poets or the
+Latin, excepting only Virgil:  and there is no question but he
+thought he had Virgil's authority for that licence.  But I am
+confident our poet never meant to leave him or any other such a
+precedent; and I ground my opinion on these two reasons:  first, we
+find no example of a hemistich in any of his Pastorals or Georgics,
+for he had given the last finishing strokes to both these poems; but
+his "AEneis" he left so incorrect, at least so short of that
+perfection at which he aimed, that we know how hard a sentence he
+passed upon it.  And, in the second place, I reasonably presume that
+he intended to have filled up all these hemistichs, because in one
+of them we find the sense imperfect:-
+
+
+"Quem tibi jam Troja . . . " ("AEn." iii. 340.)
+
+
+which some foolish grammarian has ended for him with a half-line of
+nonsense:-
+
+
+"Peperit fumante Creusa."
+
+
+For Ascanius must have been born some years before the burning of
+that city, which I need not prove.  On the other side we find also
+that he himself filled up one line in the sixth AEneid, the
+enthusiasm seizing him while he was reading to Augustus:-
+
+
+"Misenum AEolidem, quo non praestantior alter
+AEre ciere viros, . . . "
+
+
+to which he added in that transport, Martemque accendare cantu, and
+never was any line more nobly finished, for the reasons which I have
+given in the "Book of Painting."
+
+On these considerations I have shunned hemistichs, not being willing
+to imitate Virgil to a fault, like Alexander's courtiers, who
+affected to hold their necks awry because he could not help it.  I
+am confident your lordship is by this time of my opinion, and that
+you will look on those half-lines hereafter as the imperfect
+products of a hasty muse, like the frogs and serpents in the Nile,
+part of them kindled into life, and part a lump of unformed,
+unanimated mud.
+
+I am sensible that many of my whole verses are as imperfect as those
+halves, for want of time to digest them better.  But give me leave
+to make the excuse of Boccace, who, when he was upbraided that some
+of his novels had not the spirit of the rest, returned this answer:
+that Charlemagne, who made the Paladins, was never able to raise an
+army of them.  The leaders may be heroes, but the multitude must
+consist of common men.
+
+I am also bound to tell your lordship, in my own defence, that from
+the beginning of the first Georgic to the end of the last AEneid, I
+found the difficulty of translation growing on me in every
+succeeding book.  For Virgil, above all poets, had a stock which I
+may call almost inexhaustible, of figurative, elegant, and sounding
+words.  I, who inherit but a small portion of his genius, and write
+in a language so much inferior to the Latin, have found it very
+painful to vary phrases when the same sense returns upon me.  Even
+he himself, whether out of necessity or choice, has often expressed
+the same thing in the same words, and often repeated two or three
+whole verses which he had used before.  Words are not so easily
+coined as money; and yet we see that the credit not only of banks,
+but of exchequers, cracks when little comes in and much goes out.
+Virgil called upon me in every line for some new word, and I paid so
+long that I was almost bankrupt; so that the latter end must needs
+be more burthensome than the beginning or the middle; and
+consequently the twelfth AEneid cost me double the time of the first
+and second.  What had become of me, if Virgil had taxed me with
+another book?  I had certainly been reduced to pay the public in
+hammered money for want of milled; that is, in the same old words
+which I had used before; and the receivers must have been forced to
+have taken anything, where there was so little to be had.
+
+Besides this difficulty with which I have struggled and made a shift
+to pass it ever, there is one remaining, which is insuperable to all
+translators.  We are bound to our author's sense, though with the
+latitudes already mentioned; for I think it not so sacred as that
+one iota must not be added or diminished, on pain of an anathema.
+But slaves we are, and labour on another man's plantation; we dress
+the vineyard, but the wine is the owner's.  If the soil be sometimes
+barren, then we are sure of being scourged; if it be fruitful, and
+our care succeeds, we are not thanked; for the proud reader will
+only say--the poor drudge has done his duty.  But this is nothing to
+what follows; for being obliged to make his sense intelligible, we
+are forced to untune our own verses that we may give his meaning to
+the reader.  He who invents is master of his thoughts and words:  he
+can turn and vary them as he pleases, till he renders them
+harmonious.  But the wretched translator has no such privilege, for
+being tied to the thoughts, he must make what music he can in the
+expression; and for this reason it cannot always be so sweet as that
+of the original.  There is a beauty of sound, as Segrais has
+observed, in some Latin words, which is wholly lost in any modern
+language.  He instances in that mollis amaracus, on which Venus lays
+Cupid in the first AEneid.  If I should translate it sweet-marjoram,
+as the word signifies, the reader would think I had mistaken Virgil;
+for these village-words, as I may call them, give us a mean idea of
+the thing; but the sound of the Latin is so much more pleasing, by
+the just mixture of the vowels with the consonants, that it raises
+our fancies to conceive somewhat more noble than a common herb, and
+to spread roses under him, and strew lilies over him--a bed not
+unworthy the grandson of the goddess.
+
+If I cannot copy his harmonious numbers, how shall I imitate his
+noble flights, where his thoughts and words are equally sublime?
+Quem
+
+
+" . . . quisquis studet aemulari,
+. . . caeratis ope Dedalea
+Nititur pennis, vitreo daturus
+Nomina ponto."
+
+
+What modern language or what poet can express the majestic beauty of
+this one verse, amongst a thousand others?
+
+
+"Aude, hospes, contemnere opes, et te quoque dignum
+Finge Deo . . . "
+
+
+For my part, I am lost in the admiration of it.  I contemn the world
+when I think on it, and myself when I translate it.
+
+Lay by Virgil, I beseech your lordship and all my better sort of
+judges, when you take up my version, and it will appear a passable
+beauty when the original muse is absent; but like Spenser's false
+Florimel, made of snow, it melts and vanishes when the true one
+comes in sight.
+
+I will not excuse, but justify, myself for one pretended crime with
+which I am liable to be charged by false critics, not only in this
+translation, but in many of my original poems--that I Latinise too
+much.  It is true, that when I find an English word significant and
+sounding, I neither borrow from the Latin nor any other language;
+but when I want at home, I must seek abroad.  If sounding words are
+not of our growth and manufacture, who shall hinder me to import
+them from a foreign country?  I carry not out the treasure of the
+nation which is never to return, but what I bring from Italy I spend
+in England.  Here it remains and here it circulates, for if the coin
+be good it will pass from one hand to another.  I trade both with
+the living and the dead for the enrichment of our native language.
+We have enough in England to supply our necessity; but if we will
+have things of magnificence and splendour, we must get them by
+commerce.  Poetry requires ornament, and that is not to be had from
+our old Teuton monosyllables; therefore, if I find any elegant word
+in a classic author, I propose it to be naturalised by using it
+myself; and if the public approves of it, the bill passes.  But
+every man cannot distinguish betwixt pedantry and poetry; every man,
+therefore, is not fit to innovate.
+
+Upon the whole matter, a poet must first be certain that the word he
+would introduce is beautiful in the Latin; and is to consider, in
+the next place, whether it will agree with the English idiom.  After
+this he ought to take the opinion of judicious friends, such as are
+learned in both languages; and lastly, since no man is infallible,
+let him use this licence very sparingly; for if too many foreign
+words are poured in upon us, it looks as if they were designed not
+to assist the natives, but to conquer them.
+
+I am now drawing towards a conclusion, and suspect your lordship is
+very glad of it.  But permit me first to own what helps I have had
+in this undertaking.  The late Earl of Lauderdale sent me over his
+new translation of the "AEneis," which he had ended before I engaged
+in the same design.  Neither did I then intend it; but some
+proposals being afterwards made me by my bookseller, I desired his
+lordship's leave that I might accept them, which he freely granted,
+and I have his letter yet to show for that permission.  He resolved
+to have printed his work, which he might have done two years before
+I could publish mine; and had performed it, if death had not
+prevented him.  But having his manuscript in my hands, I consulted
+it as often as I doubted of my author's sense, for no man understood
+Virgil better than that learned nobleman.  His friends, I hear, have
+yet another and more correct copy of that translation by them, which
+had they pleased to have given the public, the judges must have been
+convinced that I have not flattered him.
+
+Besides this help, which was not inconsiderable, Mr. Congreve has
+done me the favour to review the "AEneis," and compare my version
+with the original.  I shall never be ashamed to own that this
+excellent young man has shown me many faults, which I have
+endeavoured to correct.  It is true he might have easily found more,
+and then my translation had been more perfect.
+
+Two other worthy friends of mine, who desire to have their names
+concealed, seeing me straitened in my time, took pity on me and gave
+me the life of Virgil, the two prefaces--to the Pastorals and the
+Georgics--and all the arguments in prose to the whole translation;
+which perhaps has caused a report that the two first poems are not
+mine.  If it had been true that I had taken their verses for my own,
+I might have gloried in their aid; and like Terence, have farthered
+the opinion that Scipio and Laelius joined with me.  But the same
+style being continued through the whole, and the same laws of
+versification observed, are proofs sufficient that this is one man's
+work; and your lordship is too well acquainted with my manner to
+doubt that any part of it is another's.
+
+That your lordship may see I was in earnest when I premised to
+hasten to an end, I will not give the reasons why I writ not always
+in the proper terms of navigation, land-service, or in the cant of
+any profession.  I will only say that Virgil has avoided these
+proprieties, because he writ not to mariners, soldiers, astronomers,
+gardeners, peasants, &c., but to all in general, and in particular
+to men and ladies of the first quality, who have been better bred
+than to be too nicely knowing in the terms.  In such cases, it is
+enough for a poet to write so plainly that he may be understood by
+his readers; to avoid impropriety, and not affect to be thought
+learned in all things.
+
+I have emitted the four preliminary lines of the first AEneid,
+because I think them inferior to any four others in the whole poem;
+and consequently believe they are not Virgil's.  There is too great
+a gap betwixt the adjective vicina in the second line, and the
+substantive arva in the latter end of the third; which keeps his
+meaning in obscurity too long, and is contrary to the clearness of
+his style.  Ut quamvis avido is too ambitious an ornament to be his,
+and gratum opus agricolis are all words unnecessary, and independent
+of what he had said before.  Horrentia Martis arma is worse than any
+of the rest.  Horrentia is such a flat epithet as Tully would have
+given us in his verses.  It is a mere filler to stop a vacancy in
+the hexameter, and connect the preface to the work of Virgil.
+
+Our author seems to sound a charge, and begins like the clangour of
+a trumpet:-
+
+
+"Arma, virumque cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris," -
+
+
+Scarce a word without an r, and the vowels for the greater part
+sonorous.  The prefacer began with Ille ego, which he was
+constrained to patch up in the fourth line with at nunc to make the
+sense cohere; and if both those words are not notorious botches I am
+much deceived, though the French translator thinks otherwise.  For
+my own part, I am rather of the opinion that they were added by
+Tucca and Varius, than retrenched.
+
+I know it may be answered by such as think Virgil the author of the
+four lines--that he asserts his title to the "AEneis" in the
+beginning of this work, as he did to the two former, in the last
+lines of the fourth Georgic.  I will not reply otherwise to this,
+than by desiring them to compare these four lines with the four
+others, which we know are his, because no poet but he alone could
+write them.  If they cannot distinguish creeping from flying, let
+them lay down Virgil, and take up Ovid de Ponto in his stead.  My
+master needed not the assistance of that preliminary poet to prove
+his claim:  his own majestic mien discovers him to be the king
+amidst a thousand courtiers.  It was a superfluous office, and
+therefore I would not set those verses in the front of Virgil; but
+have rejected them to my own preface:
+
+
+"I, who before, with shepherds in the groves,
+Sung to my oaten pipe their rural loves,
+And issuing thence, compelled the neighb'ring field
+A plenteous crop of rising corn to yield;
+Manured the glebe, and stocked the fruitful plain
+(A poem grateful to the greedy swain)," &c.
+
+
+If there be not a tolerable line in all these six, the prefacer gave
+me no occasion to write better.  This is a just apology in this
+place; but I have done great wrong to Virgil in the whole
+translation.  Want of time, the inferiority of our language, the
+inconvenience of rhyme, and all the other excuses I have made, may
+alleviate my fault, but cannot justify the boldness of my
+undertaking.  What avails it me to acknowledge freely that I have
+not been able to do him right in any line?  For even my own
+confession makes against me; and it will always be returned upon me,
+"Why, then, did you attempt it?"  To which no other answer can be
+made, than that I have done him less injury than any of his former
+libellers.
+
+What they called his picture had been drawn at length so many times
+by the daubers of almost all nations, and still so unlike him, that
+I snatched up the pencil with disdain, being satisfied beforehand
+that I could make some small resemblance of him, though I must be
+content with a worse likeness.  A sixth Pastoral, a Pharmaceutria, a
+single Orpheus, and some other features have been exactly taken.
+But those holiday authors writ for pleasure, and only showed us what
+they could have done if they would have taken pains to perform the
+whole.
+
+Be pleased, my lord, to accept with your wonted goodness this
+unworthy present which I make you.  I have taken off one trouble
+from you, of defending it, by acknowledging its imperfections; and
+though some part of them are covered in the verse (as Ericthonius
+rode always in a chariot to hide his lameness), such of them as
+cannot be concealed you will please to connive at, though in the
+strictness of your judgment you cannot pardon.  If Homer was allowed
+to nod sometimes, in so long a work it will be no wonder if I often
+fall asleep.  You took my "Aurengzebe" into your protection with all
+his faults; and I hope here cannot be so many, because I translate
+an author who gives me such examples of correctness.  What my jury
+may be I know not; but it is good for a criminal to plead before a
+favourable judge:  if I had said partial, would your lordship have
+forgiven me?  Or will you give me leave to acquaint the world that I
+have many times been obliged to your bounty since the Revolution?
+Though I never was reduced to beg a charity, nor ever had the
+impudence to ask one, either of your lordship or your noble kinsman
+the Earl of Dorset, much less of any other, yet when I least
+expected it you have both remembered me, so inherent it is in your
+family not to forget an old servant.  It looks rather like
+ingratitude on my part, that where I have been so often obliged, I
+have appeared so seldom to return my thanks, and where I was also so
+sure of being well received.  Somewhat of laziness was in the case,
+and somewhat too of modesty; but nothing of disrespect or of
+unthankfulness.  I will not say that your lordship has encouraged me
+to this presumption, lest, if my labours meet with no success in
+public, I may expose your judgment to be censured.  As for my own
+enemies, I shall never think them worth an answer; and if your
+lordship has any, they will not dare to arraign you for want of
+knowledge in this art till they can produce somewhat better of their
+own than your "Essay on Poetry."  It was on this consideration that
+I have drawn out my preface to so great a length.  Had I not
+addressed to a poet and a critic of the first magnitude, I had
+myself been taxed for want of judgment, and shamed my patron for
+want of understanding.  But neither will you, my lord, so soon be
+tired as any other, because the discourse is on your art; neither
+will the learned reader think it tedious, because it is ad Clerum:
+at least, when he begins to be weary, the church doors are open.
+That I may pursue the allegory with a short prayer after a long
+sermon.
+
+May you live happily and long for the service of your country, the
+encouragement of good letters and the ornament of poetry, which
+cannot be wished more earnestly by any man than by
+
+Your Lordship's most humble,
+Most obliged and most
+Obedient servant,
+JOHN DRYDEN.
+
+
+
+POSTSCRIPT.
+
+
+
+What Virgil wrote in the vigour of his age (in plenty and at ease) I
+have undertaken to translate in my declining years; struggling with
+wants, oppressed by sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be
+misconstrued in all I write; and my judges, if they are not very
+equitable, already prejudiced against me by the lying character
+which has been given them of my morals.  Yet steady to my
+principles, and not dispirited with my afflictions, I have, by the
+blessing of God on my endeavours, overcome all difficulties; and, in
+some measure, acquitted myself of the debt which I owed the public
+when I undertook this work.  In the first place, therefore, I
+thankfully acknowledge to the Almighty Power the assistance He has
+given me in the beginning, the prosecution, and conclusion of my
+present studies, which are more happily performed than I could have
+promised to myself when I laboured under such discouragements.  For
+what I have done, imperfect as it is for want of health and leisure
+to correct it, will be judged in after-ages, and possibly in the
+present, to be no dishonour to my native country, whose language and
+poetry would be more esteemed abroad if they were better understood.
+Somewhat (give me leave to say) I have added to both of them in the
+choice of words and harmony of numbers, which were wanting,
+especially the last, in all our poets; even in those who being
+endued with genius yet have not cultivated their mother-tongue with
+sufficient care, or, relying on the beauty of their thoughts, have
+judged the ornament of words and sweetness of sound unnecessary.
+One is for raking in Chaucer (our English Ennius) for antiquated
+words, which are never to be revived but when sound or significancy
+is wanting in the present language.  But many of his deserve not
+this redemption any more than the crowds of men who daily die, or
+are slain for sixpence in a battle, merit to be restored to life if
+a wish could revive them.  Others have no ear for verse, nor choice
+of words, nor distinction of thoughts, but mingle farthings with
+their gold to make up the sum.  Here is a field of satire opened to
+me, but since the Revolution I have wholly renounced that talent.
+For who would give physic to the great, when he is uncalled, to do
+his patient no good and endanger himself for his prescription?
+Neither am I ignorant but I may justly be condemned for many of
+these faults of which I have too liberally arraigned others:
+
+
+"Cynthius aurem
+Vellit, et admonuit."
+
+
+It is enough for me if the government will let me pass unquestioned.
+In the meantime I am obliged in gratitude to return my thanks to
+many of them, who have not only distinguished me from others of the
+same party by a particular exception of grace, but without
+considering the man have been bountiful to the poet, have encouraged
+Virgil to speak such English as I could teach him, and rewarded his
+interpreter for the pains he has taken in bringing him over into
+Britain by defraying the charges of his voyage.  Even Cerberus, when
+he had received the sop, permitted AEneas to pass freely to Elysium.
+Had it been offered me and I had refused it, yet still some
+gratitude is due to such who were willing to oblige me.  But how
+much more to those from whom I have received the favours which they
+have offered to one of a different persuasion; amongst whom I cannot
+omit naming the Earls of Derby and of Peterborough.  To the first of
+these I have not the honour to be known, and therefore his
+liberality [was] as much unexpected as it was undeserved.  The
+present Earl of Peterborough has been pleased long since to accept
+the tenders of my service:  his favours are so frequent to me that I
+receive them almost by prescription.  No difference of interests or
+opinion has been able to withdraw his protection from me, and I
+might justly be condemned for the most unthankful of mankind if I
+did not always preserve for him a most profound respect and
+inviolable gratitude.  I must also add that if the last AEneid shine
+amongst its fellows, it is owing to the commands of Sir William
+Trumbull, one of the principal Secretaries of State, who recommended
+it, as his favourite, to my care; and for his sake particularly I
+have made it mine.  For who would confess weariness when he enjoined
+a fresh labour?  I could not but invoke the assistance of a muse for
+this last office:-
+
+
+"Extremum hunc, Arethusa; . . .
+. . . neget quis carmina Gallo?"
+
+
+Neither am I to forget the noble present which was made me by
+Gilbert Dolben, Esq., the worthy son of the late Archbishop of York,
+who (when I began this work) enriched me with all the several
+editions of Virgil and all the commentaries of those editions in
+Latin, amongst which I could not but prefer the Dauphin's as the
+last, the shortest, and the most judicious.  Fabrini I had also sent
+me from Italy, but either he understands Virgil very imperfectly or
+I have no knowledge of my author.
+
+Being invited by that worthy gentleman, Sir William Bowyer, to
+Denham Court, I translated the first Georgic at his house and the
+greatest part of the last AEneid.  A more friendly entertainment no
+man ever found.  No wonder, therefore, if both these versions
+surpass the rest; and own the satisfaction I received in his
+converse, with whom I had the honour to be bred in Cambridge, and in
+the same college.  The seventh AEneid was made English at Burghley,
+the magnificent abode of the Earl of Exeter.  In a village belonging
+to his family I was born, and under his roof I endeavoured to make
+that AEneid appear in English with as much lustre as I could, though
+my author has not given the finishing strokes either to it or to the
+eleventh, as I perhaps could prove in both if I durst presume to
+criticise my master.
+
+By a letter from William Walsh, Esq., of Abberley (who has so long
+honoured me with his friendship, and who, without flattery, is the
+best critic of our nation), I have been informed that his Grace the
+Duke of Shrewsbury has procured a printed copy of the Pastorals,
+Georgics, and six first AEneids from my bookseller, and has read
+them in the country together with my friend.  This noble person
+(having been pleased to give them a commendation which I presume not
+to insert) has made me vain enough to boast of so great a favour,
+and to think I have succeeded beyond my hopes; the character of his
+excellent judgment, the acuteness of his wit, and his general
+knowledge of good letters, being known as well to all the world as
+the sweetness of his disposition, his humanity, his easiness of
+access, and desire of obliging those who stand in need of his
+protection are known to all who have approached him, and to me in
+particular, who have formerly had the honour of his conversation.
+Whoever has given the world the translation of part of the third
+Georgic (which he calls "The Power of Love") has put me to
+sufficient pains to make my own not inferior to his; as my Lord
+Roscommon's "Silenus" had formerly given me the same trouble.  The
+most ingenious Mr. Addison, of Oxford, has also been as troublesome
+to me as the other two, and on the same account; after his bees my
+latter swarm is scarcely worth the hiving.  Mr. Cowley's praise of a
+country life is excellent, but it is rather an imitation of Virgil
+than a version.  That I have recovered in some measure the health
+which I had lost by too much application to this work, is owing
+(next to God's mercy) to the skill and care of Dr. Guibbons and Dr.
+Hobbs (the two ornaments of their profession), whom I can only pay
+by this acknowledgment.  The whole faculty has always been ready to
+oblige me, and the only one of them who endeavoured to defame me had
+it not in his power.  I desire pardon from my readers for saying so
+much in relation to myself which concerns not them; and with my
+acknowledgments to all my subscribers, have only to add that the few
+notes which follow are par maniere d'acquit, because I had obliged
+myself by articles to do somewhat of that kind.  These scattering
+observations are rather guesses at my author's meaning in some
+passages than proofs that so he meant.  The unlearned may have
+recourse to any poetical dictionary in English for the names of
+persons, places, or fables, which the learned need not, but that
+little which I say is either new or necessary, and the first of
+these qualifications never fails to invite a reader, if not to
+please him.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry, by Dryden
+
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