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 mean time, 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

→ Both the copies printed in our author's life-time, as well as the modern editions, here read-" That which makes this accusation look so strange," &c. It was clearly an errour of the press in the first edition, which was implicitly followed in all subsequent. From a pas. sage in one of our author's letters, it should seem that he

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 heroick 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.

did not himself correct the proof-sheets of his work, as they passed through the press; but having corrected such errours as struck him, in the first edition of his Virgil, left his emendations to their fate. Here, however, I believe the misprint (for so it must have been) wholly escaped him. The same words are more than once confounded in the early editions of Shakspeare's plays.

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 ÆNEIS, which resemble some parts both of the ILIAS and of the ODYSSES; as for example, Æneas descended into Hell, and Ulysses had been there before him: Æneas 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 ÆNEIS? 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 Æneas into Italy?* of establishing the Roman empire on the foundations of a Trojan colony? to say nothing of the

* The answer to this question will not add any support to our author's argument." It appears (says Mr. Holdsworth) from Dionysius Halicarnassensis's account of Æneas's going into Italy, that Virgil did not follow his own fancy, but the tradition of those times. That historian gives much the same account of his course both by sea and land, and mentions several of the little particulars, that might be most suspected of being rather poetical than historical." Spence's ANECDOTES.

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. Æneadum 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 Æneas; 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 Æneas 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.

Suppose

To return to my first similitude. 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 draughts 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 shewed 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 Æneas 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