Virgil would not have translated it from Hesiod, had he not discovered some beauty in it; and, indeed, the beauty of it is what I have before observed to be frequently met with in Virgil, the delivering the precept so indirectly, and singling out the particular circumstance of sowing and ploughing naked, to suggest to us that these employments are proper only in the hot season of the year.

I shall not here compare the style of the Georgics with that of Lucretius, which the reader may see already done in the preface to the second volume of Miscellaneous Poems; but shall conclude this poem to be the most complete, elaborate, and finished piece of all antiquity. The Eneïs, indeed, is of a nobler kind, but the Georgic is more perfect in its kind. The Eneïs has a greater variety of beauties in it, but those of the Georgic are more exquisite. In short, the Georgic has all the perfection that can be expected in a poem written by the greatest poet in the flower of his age, when his invention was ready, his imagination warm, his judgment settled, and all his faculties in their full vigour and maturity.

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS.

POEMS

ON

SEVERAL OCCASIONS.

ΤΟ

MR. DRYDEN.

How long, great poet, shall thy sacred lays
Provoke our wonder, and transcend our praise?
Can neither injuries of time, nor age,

Damp thy poetic heat, and quench thy rage?
Not so thy Ovid in his exile wrote,

Grief chill'd his breast, and check'd his rising thought;
Pensive and sad, his drooping Muse betrays
The Roman genius in its last decays.

Prevailing warmth has still thy mind possest,
And second youth is kindled in thy breast;
Thou mak'st the beauties of the Romans known,
And England boasts of riches not her own;
Thy lines have heighten'd Virgil's majesty,
And Horace wonders at himself in thee.
Thou teachest Persius to inform our isle
In smoother numbers, and a clearer style;
And Juvenal, instructed in thy page,

Edges his satire, and improves his rage.