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more of the idiom of it than any other words. We hear indeed among our poets, of the thundering of guns, the fmoke, the diforder, and the flaughter; but all these are common notions. And certainly, as those who, in a logical difpute, keep in general terms, would hide a fallacy, fo thofe, who do it in any poetical defcription, would veil their ignorance.

Defcriptas fervare vices operumque colores,
Cur ego, fi nequeo ignoroque, Poeta falutor?

For my own part, if I had little knowledge of the fea, yet I have thought it no shame to learn; and if I have made fome few mistakes, 'tis only, as you can bear me witness, because I have wanted opportunity to correct them; the whole poem being firft written, and now fent you from a place, where I have not fo much as the converfe of any feaman. Yet though the trouble I had in writing it was great, it was more than recompenfed by the pleasure. I found myself fo warm in celebrating the praises of military men, two such especially as the Prince and General, that it is no wonder if they inspired me with thoughts above my ordinary level. And I am well fatisfied, that, as they are incomparably the best subject I ever had, excepting only the Royal Family, fo alfo, that this I have written of them is much better than what I have performed on any other. I have been forced to help out other arguments; but this has been bountiful to me they have been low and barren of praise, and I have exalted them, and made them fruitful; but here Omnia fponte fuá reddit juftiffima tellus.

I have had a large, a fair, and a pleafant field; fo fertile, that without my cultivating, it has given me two harvests in a fummer, and in both oppreffed the reaper. All other greatness in fubjects is only counterfeit; it will not endure the teft of danger; the greatnefs of arms is only real; other greatnefs burdens a nation with its weight, this fupports it with its ftrength. And as it is the happiness of the age, fo it is the peculiar goodness of the best of kings, that we may praise his fubjects without offending him. Doubtless it proceeds from a juft confidence of his own virtue, which the luftre of no other can be fo great as to darken in him; for the good or the valiant are never fafely praised under a bad or a degenerate prince. But to return from this digreffion to a farther account of my poem; I muft crave leave to tell you, that as I have endeavoured to adorn it with noble thoughts, fo much more to exprefs those thoughts with elocution. The compofition of all poems is, or ought to be, of wit; and wit in the poet, or wit-writing (if you will give me leave to use a school-diftinction) is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer, which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of memory, 'till it fprings the quarry it hunted after; or, without metaphor, which fearches over all the memory for the species or ideas of those things which it defigns to reprefent. Wit written is that which is well defined, the happy refult of thought, or product of imagination. But to proceed from wit, in the general notion of it, to the proper wit of an heroic or

historical poem, I judge it chiefly to confift in the delightful imaging of perfons, actions, paffions, or things. "Tis not the jerk or fting of an epigram, nor the feeming contradiction of a poor antithefis, (the delight of an ill-judging audience in a play of rhyme) nor the gingle of a more poor Paranomafia; neither is it fo much the morality of a grave fentence, affected by Lucan, but more fparingly used by Virgil; but it is fome lively and apt defcription, dreffed in fuch colours of fpeech, that it fets before your eyes the absent object, as perfectly and more delightfully than nature. So then the firft happiness of the poet's imagination is properly invention or finding of the thought; the fecond is fancy, or the variation, deriving or moulding of that thought as the judgment reprefents it proper to the fubject; the third is elocution, or the art of cloathing and adorning that thought, fo found and varied, in apt, fignificant, and founding words: the quickness of the imagination is feen in the invention, the fertility in the fancy, and the accuracy in the expreffion. For the two first of thefe, Ovid is famous amongst the poets; for the latter, Virgil. Ovid images more often the movements and affections of the mind, either combating between two contrary paffions, or extremely dif compofed by one. His words therefore are the leaft part of his care; for he pictures nature in diforder, with which the ftudy and choice of words is inconfiftent. This is the proper wit of dialogue or difcourfe, and confequently of the drama, where all that is faid is to be fuppofed the effect of fudden

thought; which, though it excludes not the quicknefs of wit in repartees, yet admits not a too curious election of words, too frequent allufions, or ufe of tropes, or in fine any thing that fhews remoteness of thought or labour in the writer. On the other fide, Virgil fpeaks not fo often to us in the perfon of another, like Ovid, but in his own: he relates almost all things as from himself, and thereby gains more liberty than the other, to exprefs his thoughts with all the graces of elocution, to write more figuratively, and to confess as well the labour, as the force of his imagination. Though he defcribes his Dido well and naturally, in the violence of her paffions, yet he muft yield in that to the Myrrha, the Biblis, the Althæa, of Ovid; for as great an admirer of him as I am, I muft acknowledge, that if I fee not more of their fouls than I fee of Dido's, at leaft I have a greater concernmen for them: and that convinces me, that Ovid has touched those tender ftrokes more delicately than Virgil could. But when action or perfons are to be defcribed, when any fuch image is to be fet before us, how bold, how masterly are the strokes of Virgil!We fee the objects he prefents us with in their native figures, in their proper motions; but fo we fee them, as our own eyes could never have beheld them fo beautiful in themselves. We fee the foul of the poet, like that univerfal one of which he speaks, informing and moving through all his pictures:

-Totamque infufa per artus

Mens agitat molem, & magno fe corpore miscet.

We behold him embellishing his images, as he makes Venus breathing beauty upon her fon Æneas.

lumenque juventæ

Purpureum, & lætos oculis afflârat honores :
Quale manus addunt Ebori decus, aut ubi flavo
Argentum Pariufve lapis circundatur auro.

See his Tempeft, his Funeral Sports, his Combat of Turnus and Æneas: and in his Georgics, which I efteem the divineft part of all his writings, the Plague, the Country, the Battle of the Bulls, the Labour of the Bees, and thofe many other excellent images of nature, most of which are neither great in themselves, nor have any natural ornament to bear them up but the words wherewith he describes them are fo excellent, that it might be well applied to him, which was faid by Ovid, Materiam fuperabat opus : very found of his words has often fomewhat that is connatural to the subject; and while we read him, we fit, as in a play, beholding the fcenes of what he reprefents. To perform this, he made frequent use of tropes, which you know change the nature of a known word, by applying it to fome other fignification; and this is it which Horace means in his epiftle to the Pifos :

the

Dixeris egregiè, notum fi callida verbum
Reddiderit junctura novum-

But I am fenfible I have prefumed too far to entertain you with a rude difcourfe of that art, which you both know fo well, and put into practice with fo

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