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, judgeing 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 excellencies, 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 possibly 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 * Sic Maro nec Calabri tentavit carmina Flacci, MART. lib. VIII, epig. XVIII, 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 Varo, Lucretius, and Catullus; and at the same time lived Cicero, and Sallust, and Cæsar. A famous age in modern times, for learning in every kind, was that of Lorenzo de Medici, and his son Leo the Tenth; where-. in 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 go vernment. 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 bear 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. * * "Would it be imagined," says Dr Johnson, "that, of this rival to antiquity, all the satires were little personal invectives, and that his longest composition was a song of eleven stanzas? The blame, however, of this exaggerated praise falls on the encomiast, noț upon the author; whose performances are, what they pretend to be, the effusions of a man of wit; gay, vigorous, and airy." 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 Cæsar. 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 excellencies 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 rules 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 conceipts; 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 Flecno; 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 Lewis, their Pucelle, or their Alarique. † 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 * * Dryden's recollection seems here deficient. There is, no doubt, a close imitation of the Iliad throughout the Jerusalem; but the death of the Swedish Prince was so far from being the motive of Rinaldo's return to the wars, that Rinaldo seems never to have heard either of that person or of his fate until he was delivered from the garden of Armida, and on his voyage to join Godfrey's army. + Epic poems by Le Moyne, Chapelain, and Scuderi; of which it may be enough to say, that they are in the stale, weary, flat, and unprofitable taste of all French heroics. |