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that they had much credit with him, that he seemed to have made it a maxim to let them often feel how little power they had even in small matters. His favourites had a more entire power, but he accustomed them only to inform him of things, but to be sparing in offering advice, except when it was asked. It was not easy to account for the reasons of the favour that he showed, in the highest instances, to two persons beyond all others, the Earls of Portland and Albemarle, they being in all respects men not only of different, but of opposite characters. Secrecy and fidelity were the only qualities in which it could be said that they did in any sort agree. I have now run through the chief branches of his character. I had occasion to know him well, having observed him very carefully in a course of sixteen years. I had a large measure of his favour, and a free access to him all the while, though not at all times to the same degree. The freedom that I used with him was not always acceptable; but he saw that I served him faithfully; so, after some intervals of coldness, he always returned to a good measure of confidence in me. I was, in many great instances, much obliged by him; but that was not my chief bias to him; I considered him as a person raised up by God to resist the power of France, and the progress of tyranny and persecution. The series of the five Princes of Orange that was now ended in him, was the noblest succession of heroes that we find in any history. And the thirty years, from the year 1672 to his death, in which he acted so great a part, carry in them so many amazing steps of a glorious and distinguishing Providence, that, in the words of David, he may be called "The man of God's right hand, whom he made strong for himself.' After all the abatements that may be allowed for his errors and faults, he ought still to be reckoned among the greatest princes that our history, or indeed that any other, glory, since he had formed a great alliance, and had projected the whole scheme of the war; so that if it succeeds, a great part of the honour of it will be ascribed to him; and if otherwise, it will be said he was the soul of the alliance, that did both animate and knit it together, and that it was natural for that body to die and fall asunder, when he who gave it life was withdrawn. Upon his death, some moved for a magnificent funeral; but it seemed not decent to run into unnecessary expense, when we were entering on a war that must be maintained at a vast charge. So a private funeral was resolved on. But for the honour of his memory, a noble monument and an equestrian statue were ordered. Some years must show whether these things were really intended, or if they were only spoke of to excuse the privacy of his funeral, which was scarce decent, so far was it from being magnificent.

can afford. He died in a critical time for his own

JOHN DRYDEN.

DRYDEN, who contributed more than any other English writer to improve the poetical diction of his native tongue, performed also essential service of the same kind with respect to the quality of our prose. Throwing off, still more than Cowley had lone, those inversions and other forms of Latin idiom which abound in the pages of his most distinguished predecessors, Dryden speaks in the language of one addressing, in easy yet dignified conversational phraseology, an assemblage of polite and well-educated men. Strength, ease, copiousness, variety, and animation, are the predominant qualities of his style; but the haste with which he composed, and his inherent dislike to the labour of correction, are sometimes betrayed by the negligence and roughness of his sentences. On the whole, however, to the prose of Dryden may be assigned the foremost place

among the specimens which can be furnished of vigorous and genuine idiomatic English. In addition to the qualities just enumerated, it possesses those of equability and freedom from mannerism. Speaking of this attribute of Dryden's style, Dr Johnson observes, He who writes much, will not easily escape a manner-such a recurrence of particular modes as may be easily noted. Dryden is always another and the same; he does not exhibit a second time the same elegances in the same form, nor appears to have any art other than that of expressing with clearness what he thinks with vigour. His | style could not easily be imitated, either seriously or ludicrously; for, being always equable and always varied, it has no prominent or discriminative characters. The beauty who is totally free from disproportion of parts and features, cannot be ridiculed by an overcharged resemblance."

Dryden has left no extensive work in prose; the pieces which he wrote were merely accompaniments to his poems and plays, and consist of prefaces, dedications, and critical essays. His dedications are noted for the fulsome and unprincipled flattery in which he seems to have thought himself authorised | by his poverty to indulge. The critical essays, though written with more haste and carelessness than would now be tolerated in similar productions, embody many sound and vigorously-expressed thoughts on subjects connected with polite lite rature. Of his prefaces Dr Johnson remarks, They have not the formality of a settled style, in which the first half of the sentence betrays the other. The clauses are never balanced, nor the periods modelled; every word seems to drop by chance, though it falls the whole is airy, animated, and vigorous; what is into its proper place. Nothing is cold or languid; little is gay; what is great is splendid. He may be thought to mention himself too frequently; bat not refuse him to stand high in his own. Every while he forces himself upon our esteem, we canthing is excused by the play of images and the sprightliness of expression. Though all is easy, nothing is feeble; though all seems careless, there is nothing harsh; and though, since his earlier works, more than a century has passed, they have nothing | yet uncouth or obsolete.'

According to the same critic, Dryden's Essay on Dramatic Poesy was the first regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing. He who, having formed his opinions in the present age of English literature, turns back to peruse this dialogue, will not perhaps find much increase of knowledge, or much novelty of instruction; but he is to remember that critical principles were then in the hands of a few, who had gathered them partly from the ancients, and partly from the Italians and French. The structure of dramatic poems was then not generally understood. Audiences applauded by instinct, and poets, perhaps, often pleased by chance.

A writer who obtains his full purpose, loses himself in his own lustre. Of an opinion which is no longer doubted, the evidence ceases to be examined. Of an art universally practised, the first teacher is ! forgotten. Learning, once made popular, is no longer learning; it has the appearance of something which we have bestowed upon ourselves, as the dew appears to rise from the field which it refreshes.

To judge rightly of an author, we must transport ourselves to his time, and examine what were the wants of his cotemporaries, and what were his means of supplying them. That which was easy at one time was difficult at another. Dryden, at least, imported his science, and gave his country what it

* Johnson's Life of Dryden.

wanted before; or rather he imported only the materials, and manufactured them by his own skill.

say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,

Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.1

The consideration of this made Mr Hales of Eton

Bay, that there was no subject of which any poet ever writ, but he would produce it much better done in preferred before him, yet the age wherein he lived, Shakspeare; and however others are now generally which had contemporaries with him Fletcher and Jonson, never equalled them to him in their esteem. And in the last king's court, when Ben's reputation was at highest, Sir John Suckling, and with him the greater part of the courtiers, set our Shakspeare far above him.

[Beaumont and Fletcher.]

The Dialogue on the Drama was one of his first essays of criticism, written when he was yet a timorous candidate for reputation, and therefore laboured with that diligence, which he might allow himself somewhat to remit, when his name gave sanction to his positions, and his awe of the public was abated, partly by custom and partly by success. It will not be easy to find, in all the opulence of our language, a treatise so artfully variegated with successive representations of opposite probabilities, so enlivened with imagery, so brightened with illustrations. His portraits of the English dramatists are wrought with great spirit and diligence. The account of Shakspeare may stand as a perpetual model of encomiastic criticism; being lofty with- Beaumont and Fletcher, of whom I am next to out exaggeration. The praise lavished by Longinus speak, had, with the advantage of Shakspeare's wit, on the attestation of the heroes of Marathon by which was their precedent, great natural gifts, imDemosthenes, fades away before it. In a few lines proved by study; Beaumont especially, being so acis exhibited a character so extensive in its compre- curate a judge of plays, that Ben Jonson, while he hension, and so curious in its limitations, that lived, submitted all his writings to his censure, and, nothing can be added, diminished, or reformed; nor 'tis thought, used his judgment in correcting, if not can the editors and admirers of Shakspeare, in all contriving, all his plots. What value he had for him, their emulation of reverence, boast of much more appears by the verses he writ to him, and therefore than of having diffused and paraphrased this epitome I need speak no farther of it. The first play that of excellence of having changed Dryden's gold for brought Fletcher and him in esteem was their 'Phibaser metal, of lower value though of greater bulk. laster;' for before that they had written two or three In this, and in all his other essays on the same very unsuccessfully: as the like is reported of Ben subject, the criticism of Dryden is the criticism of a Jonson, before he writ Every Man in his Humour.' poet, not a dull collection of theorems, not a rude Their plots were generally more regular than Shakdetection of faults which, perhaps, the censor was not speare's, especially those which were made before able to have committed, but a gay and vigorous Beaumont's death; and they understood and imidissertation, where delight is mingled with instruc- tated the conversation of gentlemen much better; tion, and where the author proves his right of judg-whose wild debaucheries, and quickness of wit in rement by his power of performance.' partees, no poet before them could paint as they have done. Humour, which Ben Jonson derived from particular persons, they made it not their business to describe: they represented all the passions very lively, but above all, love. I am apt to believe the English language in them arrived to its highest perfection: what words have since been taken in, are rather superfluous than ornamental. Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage; two of theirs being acted through the year, for one of Shakspeare's or Jonson's: the reason is, beIt is recorded by Malone, that Dryden's miscel-cause there is a certain gaiety in their comedies, and laneous prose writings were held in high estimation pathos in their more serious plays, which suits geneby Edmund Burke, who carefully studied them on rally with all men's humours. Shakspeare's lanaccount equally of their style and matter, and is guage is likewise a little obsolete, and Ben Jonson's thought to have in some degree taken them as the wit comes short of theirs.

"The prose of Dryden,' says Sir Walter Scott, may rank with the best in the English language. It is no less of his own formation than his versification; is equally spirited, and equally harmonious. Without the lengthened and pedantic sentences of Clarendon, it is dignified when dignity is becoming, and is lively without the accumulation of strained and absurd allusions and metaphors, which were unfortunately mistaken for wit by many of the author's contemporaries.'

model of his own diction.

As specimens of Dryden's prose composition, we here present, in the first place, his characters of some of the most eminent English dramatists.

[Shakspeare.]

To begin, then, with Shakspeare. He was the man, who, of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily. When he describes anything, you more than see it you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation. He was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him; no man can

[Ben Jonson.]

As for Jonson, to whose character I am now arrived, if we look upon him while he was himself (for his last plays were but his dotages), I think him the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had. He was a most severe judge of himself, as well as others. One cannot say he wanted wit, but rather that he was frugal of it. In his works you find little to retrench or alter. Wit, and language, and humour also in some measure, we had before him; but something of art was wanting to the drama, till he came. He managed his strength to more advantage than any who preceded him. You seldom find him making love in any of his seenes, or endeavouring to move the passions; his genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially when he knew he came after those who had performed both to such a height. Humour was his proper sphere; and in that he delighted most to represent mechanic people. He was deeply conversant in the ancients, both Greek and

1 As the cypress is above surrounding shrubs.

Latin, and he borrowed boldly from them; there is scarce a poet or historian among the Roman authors of those times whom he has not translated in 'Sejanus' and 'Catiline.' But he has done his robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch; and what would

the spoils of these writers he so represented Rome to us, in its rites, ceremonies, and customs, that if one of their poets had written either of his tragedies, we had seen less of it than in him. If there was any fault in his language, 'twas that he weaved it too closely and laboriously, in his comedies especially: perhaps, too, he did a little too much Romanise our tongue, leaving the words which he translated almost as much Latin as he found them; wherein, though he learnedly followed their language, he did not enough comply with the idiom of ours. If I would compare him with Shakspeare, I must acknowledge him the more correct poet, but Shakspeare the greater wit. Shakspeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets: Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakspeare. To conclude of him: as he has given us the most correct plays, so, in the precepts which he has laid down in his Discoveries,' we have as many and profitable rules for perfecting the stage, as any wherewith the French can furnish us.

[Improved Style of Dramatic Dialogue after the Restoration.]

spirits of the English from their natural reservedness; loosened them from their stiff forms of conversation, and made them easy and pliant to each other in discourse. Thus, insensibly, our way of living became more free; and the fire of the English wit, which was before stifled under a constrained melancholy way of began first to

the solidity of our nation with the air and gaiety of our neighbours. This being granted to be true, it would be a wonder if the poets, whose work is imita tion, should be the only persons in three kingdoms who should not receive advantage by it; or if they should not more easily imitate the wit and conversation of the present age than of the past.

[Translations of the Ancient Poets.]

Translation is a kind of drawing after the life; where every one will acknowledge there is a double sort of likeness, a good one and a bad. It is one thing to draw the outlines true, the features like, the proportions exact, the colouring itself perhaps tolerable; and another thing to make all these graceful, by the posture, the shadowings, and chiefly by the spirit which animates the whole. I cannot, without some indignation, look on an ill copy of an excellent ori ginal: much less can I behold with patience Virgil, Homer, and some others, whose beauties I have been endeavouring all my life to imitate, so abused, as I may say, to their faces by a botching interpreter. What English readers, unacquainted with Greek or Latin, will believe me or any other man, when we

I have always acknowledged the wit of our prede-commend these authors, and confess we derive all that cessors with all the veneration which becomes me; but, I am sure, their wit was not that of gentlemen; there was ever somewhat that was ill-bred and clownish in it, and which confessed the conversation of the authors.

And this leads me to the last and greatest advantage of our writing, which proceeds from conversation. In the age wherein those poets lived, there was less of gallantry than in ours; neither did they keep the best company of theirs. Their fortune has been much like that of Epicurus in the retirement of his gardens; to live almost unknown, and to be celebrated after their decease. I cannot find that any of them had been conversant in courts, except Ben Jonson; and his genius lay not so much that way, as to make an improvement by it. Greatness was not then so easy of access, nor conversation so free, as it now is. I cannot, therefore, conceive it any insolence to affirm, that by the knowledge and pattern of their wit who writ before us, and by the advantage of our own conversation, the discourse and raillery of our comedies excel what has been written by them. And this will be denied by none, but some few old fellows who value themselves on their acquaintance with the Black Friars; who, because they saw their plays, would pretend a right to judge ours.

Now, if they ask me whence it is that our conversation is so much refined, I must freely, and without flattery, ascribe it to the court; and in it, particularly to the king, whose example gives a law to it. His own misfortunes, and the nation's, afforded him an opportunity which is rarely allowed to sovereign princes, I mean of travelling, and being conversant in the most polished courts of Europe; and thereby of cultivating a spirit which was formed by nature to receive the impressions of a gallant and generous education. At his return, he found a nation lost as much in barbarism as in rebellion: And, as the excellency of his nature forgave the one, so the excellency of his manners reformed the other. The desire of imitating so great a pattern first awakened the dull and heavy

1 Shakspeare, Jonson, &c.

is pardonable in us from their fountains, if they take those to be the same poets whom our Óglebies have translated? But I dare assure them, that a good poet is no more like himself in a dull translation, than his carcass would be to his living body. There are many who understand Greek and Latin, and yet are igno rant of their mother-tongue. The proprieties and delicacies of the English are known to few: it is impos sible even for a good wit to understand and practise them without the help of a liberal education, long reading, and digesting of those few good authors we have amongst us; the knowledge of men and manners, the freedom of habitudes and conversation with the best company of both sexes; and, in short, without wearing off the rust which he contracted while he was laying in a stock of learning. Thus difficult it is to understand the purity of English, and critically to discer not only good writers from bad, and a proper style from a corrupt, but also to distinguish that which is pure in a good author, from that which is vicious and cor rupt in him. And for want of all these requisites, or the greatest part of them, most of our ingenious young men take up some cried-up English poet for their model; adore him, and imitate him, as they think, without knowing wherein he is defective, where he is boyish and trifling, wherein either his thoughts are improper to his subject, or his expressions unworthy of his thoughts, or the turn of both is unharmonious

Thus it appears necessary that a man should be s nice critic in his mother-tongue before he attempts to translate in a foreign language. Neither is it suff cient that he be able to judge of words and style, but he must be a master of them too: he must perfectly understand his author's tongue, and absolutely cammand his own: so that to be a thorough transister, he must be a thorough poet. Neither is it enough to give his author's sense, in good English, in poetical expressions, and in musical numbers; for, though all these are exceeding difficult to perform, yet there re mains a harder task; and it is a secret of which few translators have sufficiently thought. I have already hinted a word or two concerning it; that is, the maintaining the character of an author, which distinguishes

1

verse, he commonly allows two lines for one of Virgil,
and does not always hit his sense. Tasso tells us in
his letters that Sperone Speroni, a great Italian wit,
who was his contemporary, observed of Virgil and
Tully, that the Latin orator endeavoured to imitate
the copiousness of Homer, the Greek poet; and that
the Latin poet made it his business to reach the con-
ciseness of Demosthenes, the Greek orator. Virgil,
therefore, being so very sparing of his words, and
leaving so much to be imagined by the reader, can
never be translated as he ought, in any modern tongue.
To make him copious, is to alter his character; and
to translate him line for line, is impossible; because
the Latin is naturally a more succinct language than
either the Italian, Spanish, French, or even than the
English, which, by reason of its monosyllables, is far
the most compendious of them. Virgil is much the
closest of any Roman poet, and the Latin hexameter
has more feet than the English heroic.
Besides all this, an author has the choice of his own
thoughts and words, which a translator has not; he
is confined by the sense of the inventor to those ex-
pressions which are the nearest to it; so that Virgil,
studying brevity, and having the command of his own
language, could bring those words into a narrow com-
pass, which a translator cannot render without cir-
cumlocutions. In short, they who have called him
the torture of the grammarians, might also have called
him the plague of translators; for he seems to have
studied not to be translated. I own that, endeavour-
ing to turn his 'Nisus and Euryalus' as close as I was
able, I have performed that episode too literally;
that giving more scope to Mezentius and Lausus,'
that version, which has more of the majesty of Virgil,
has less of his conciseness; and all that I can pro-
mise for myself, is only that I have done both better
than Ogleby, and perhaps as well as Caro; so that,
methinks, I come like a malefactor, to make a
speech upon the gallows, and to warn all other poets,
by my sad example, from the sacrilege of translating
Virgil. Yet, by considering him so carefully as I did
before my attempt, I have made some faint resem-
blance of him; and, had I taken more time, might
possibly have succeeded better, but never so well as
to have satisfied myself.

him from all others, and makes him appear that individual poet whom you would interpret. For example, not only the thoughts but the style and versification of Virgil and Ovid are very different; yet I see, even in our best poets, who have translated some parts of them, that they have confounded their several talents; and by endeavouring only at the sweetness and harmony of numbers, have made them both so much alike, that if I did not know the originals, I should never be able to judge by the copies which was Virgil and which was Ovid. It was objected against a late noble painter, that he drew many graceful pictures, but few of them were like. And this happened to him, because he always studied himself more than those who sat to him. In such translators I can easily distinguish the hand which performed the work, but I cannot distinguish their poet from another. Suppose two authors are equally sweet; yet there is as great distinction to be made in sweetness, as in that of sugar, and that of honey. I can make the difference more plain, by giving you (if it be worth knowing) my own method of proceeding, in my translations out of four several poets in this volume Virgil, Theocritus, Lucretius, and Horace. In each of these, before I undertook them, I considered the genius and distinguishing character of my author. I looked on Virgil as a succinct and grave majestic writer; one who weighed not only every thought, but every word and syllable; who was still aiming to crowd his sense into as narrow a compass as possibly he could; for which reason he is so very figurative, that he requires (I may almost say) a grammar apart to construe him. His verse is everywhere sounding the very thing in your ears, whose sense it bears; yet the numbers are perpetually varied, to increase the delight of the reader, so that the same sounds are never repeated twice together. On the contrary, Ovid and Claudian, though they write in styles differing from each other, yet have each of them but one sort of music in their verses. All the versification and little variety of Claudian is included within the compass of four or five lines, and then he begins again in the same tenor, perpetually closing his sense at the end of a verse, and that verse commonly which they call golden, or two substantives and two adjectives, with a verb betwixt them to keep the peace. Ovid, with all his sweetness, has as little variety of numbers and sound as he; he is always, as it were, upon the hand-gallop, and his verse runs upon carpet-ground. He avoids, like the other, all synalæphas, or cutting off one vowel when it comes before another in the following word; so that, minding only smoothness, he wants both variety and majesty. But to return to Virgil: though he is smooth where smoothness is required, yet he is so far from affecting it, that he seems rather to disdain it; frequently makes use of synalæephas, and concludes his sense in the middle of his He is everywhere above conceits of epigrammatic wit and gross hyperboles; he maintains inajesty in the midst of plainness; he shines, but glares not; and is stately without ambition, which is the vice of Lucan. I drew my definition of poetical wit from my particular consideration of him; for propriety of thoughts and words are only to be found in him; and, where they are proper, they will be delightful. Pleasure follows of necessity, as the effect does the cause, and therefore is not to be put into the definition. This exact propriety of Virgil I particularly regarded as a great part of his character; but must confess, to my shame, that I have not been able to translate any part of him so well, as to make him appear wholly like himself; for, where the original is close, no version can reach it in the same compass. Hannibal Caro's, in the Italian, is the nearest, the most poetical, and the most sonorous, of any translation of the This appears pretty enough at first sight; but I am Eneids; yet, though he takes the advantage of blank | convinced, for many reasons, that the expression is too

verse.

He who excels all other poets in his own language, were it possible to do him right, must appear above them in our tongue, which, as my Lord Roscommon justly observes, approaches nearest to the Roman in its majesty; nearest, indeed, but with a vast interval betwixt them. There is an inimitable grace in Virgil's words, and in them principally consists that beauty which gives so inexpressible a pleasure to him who best understands their force. This diction of his (I must once again say) is never to be copied; and, since it cannot, he will appear but lame in the best translation. The turns of his verse, his breakings, his propriety, his numbers, and his gravity, I have as far imitated as the poverty of our language and the hastiness of my performance would allow. I may seem sometimes to have varied from his sense; but I think the greatest variations may be fairly deduced from him; and where I leave his commentators, it may be I understand him better; at least I writ without consulting them in many places. But two particular lines in Mezentius and Lausus' I cannot so easily excuse. They are, indeed, remotely allied to Virgil's sense; but they are too like the trifling tenderness of Ovid, and were printed before I had considered them enough to alter them. The first of them I have forgotten, and cannot easily retrieve, because the copy is at the press. The second is this

When Lausus died, I was already slain.

bold; that Virgil would not have said it, though Ovid would. The reader may pardon it, if he please, for the freeness of the confession; and instead of that, and the former, admit these two lines, which are more according to the author

so absurd, that I cannot, if I would, believe them. I think a future state demonstrable even by natural arguments; at least, to take away rewards and punishments is only a pleasing prospect to a man who resolves beforehand not to live morally. But, on the other side, the thought of being nothing after death is a burden insupportable to a virtuous man, even though a heathen. We naturally aim at happiness, and cannot bear to have it confined to the shortness of our present being; especially when we consider that virtue is generally unhappy in this world, and vice fortunate: so that it is hope of futurity alone that makes this life tolerable, in expectation of a better. Who would not commit all the excesses to which he is prompted by his natural inclinations, if he may do them with security while he is alive, and be incapable of punishment after he is dead? If he be cunning and secret enough to avoid the laws, there is no band of morality to restrain him; for fame and reputation are weak ties: many men have not the least sense of them. Powerful men are only awed by them as they conduce to their interest, and that not always when a passion is predominant; and no man will be contained within the bounds of duty, when he may safely transgress them. These are my thoughts abstractedly, and without entering into the notions of our Christian faith, which is the proper business of divines.

I

But there are other arguments in this poem (which have turned into English) not belonging to the mor tality of the soul, which are strong enough to a res sonable man, to make him less in love with life, and consequently in less apprehensions of death. Such as are the natural satiety proceeding from a perpetua! enjoyment of the same things; the inconveniences of old age, which make him incapable of corporeal plea

Nor ask I life, nor fought with that design; As I had used my fortune, use thou thine. Having with much ado got clear of Virgil, I have, in the next place, to consider the genius of Lucretius, whom I have translated more happily in those parts of him which I undertook. If he was not of the best age of Roman poetry, he was at least of that which preceded it; and he himself refined it to that degree of perfection, both in the language and the thoughts, that he left an easy task to Virgil, who, as he succeeded him in time, so he copied his excellences; for the method of the Georgics is plainly derived from him. Lucretius had chosen a subject naturally crabbed; he therefore adorned it with poetical descriptions, and precepts of morality, in the beginning and ending of his books, which you see Virgil has imitated with great success in those four books, which, in my opinion, are more perfect in their kind than even his divine Eneids. The turn of his verses he has likewise followed in those places which Lucretius has most laboured, and some of his very lines he has transplanted into his own works, without much variation. If I am not mistaken, the distinguishing character of Lucretius (I mean of his soul and genius) is a certain kind of noble pride, and positive assertion of his opinions. He is everywhere confident of his own reason, and assuming an absolute command, not only over his vulgar reader, but even his patron Memmius; for he is always bidding him attend, as if he had the rod over him, and using a magisterial autho-sures; the decay of understanding and memory, which rity while he instructs him. From his time to ours, I know none so like him as our poet and philosopher of Malmesbury. This is that perpetual dictatorship which is exercised by Lucretius, who, though often in the wrong, yet seems to deal bona fide with his reader, and tells him nothing but what he thinks; in which plain sincerity, I believe, he differs from our Hobbes, who could not but be convinced, or at least doubt, of some eternal truths which he has opposed. But for Lucretius, he seems to disdain all manner of replies, and is so confident of his cause, that he is before-hand with his antagonists; urging for them whatever he imagined they could say, and leaving them, as he supposes, without an objection for the future: all this, too, with so much scorn and indignation, as if he were assured of the triumph before he entered into the lists. From this sublime and daring genius of his, it must of necessity come to pass that his thoughts must be masculine, full of argumentation, and that sufficiently warm. From the same fiery temper proceeds the loftiness of his expressions, and the perpetual torrent of his verse, where the barrenness of his subject does not too much constrain the quickness of his fancy. For there is no doubt to be made, but that he could have been everywhere as poetical as he is in his descriptions, and in the moral part of his philosophy, if he had not aimed more to instruct, in his system of nature, than to delight. But he was bent upon making Memmius a materialist, and teaching him to defy an invisible power: in short, he was so much an atheist, that he forgot sometimes to be a poet. These are the considerations which I had of that author, before I attempted to translate some parts of him. And accordingly I laid by my natural diffidence and scepticism for a while, to take up that dogmatical way of his which, as I said, is so much his character, as to make him that individual poet. As for his opinions concerning the mortality of the soul, they are

* Hobbes, who died in 1679.

render him contemptible and useless to others. These, and many other reasons, so pathetically urged, s beautifully expressed, so adorned with examples, and so admirably raised by the prosopopeia of nature, who is brought in speaking to her children with so much authority and vigour, deserve the pains I have taken with them, which I hope have not been unsuccessful, or unworthy of my author: at least I must take the liberty to own that I was pleased with my own endes vours, which but rarely happens to me; and that I am not dissatisfied upon the review of anything I have done in this author.

[Spenser and Milton.]

.and

[In epic poetry] 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 vir tue, which renders them all equal, without subordina tion or preference. Every one is most valiant in his own legend; only, we must do him that justice to ob serve, that magnanimity, which is the character of Prince Arthur, shines throughout the whole poem, a 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 conspi cuous 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

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