deed, among our poets, of the thundering of guns, the smoke, the disorder, and the slaughter; but all these are common notions. And, certainly, as those who, in a logical dispute, keep in general terms, would hide a fallacy; so those, who do it in any poetical description, would veil their ignorance.

Descriptas servare vices, operumque colores,
Cur ego, si nequeo ignoroque, Poeta salutor?

For my own part, if I had little knowledge of the
sea, yet I have thought it no shame to learn; and
if I have made some few mistakes, 'tis only, as you
can bear me witness, because I have wanted oppor-
tunity to correct them; the whole Poem being first
written, and now sent you from a place, where I
have not so much as the converse of any seamen.
Yet, though the trouble I had in writing it was
great, it was more than recompensed by the plea-
sure. 1 found myself so warm in celebrating the
praises of military men, two such especially as the
Prince and General, that it is no wonder if they in-
spired me with thoughts above my ordinary level.
And I am well satisfied that, as they are incompa-
rably the best subject I ever had, excepting only
the Royal Family; so also, 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 ex-
alted them, and made them fruitful; but here-
'Omnia sponte suâ reddit justissima tellus.' I have
had a large, a fair, and a pleasant field; so fertile,
that, without my cultivating, it has given me two
harvests in a summer, and in both oppressed the

reaper. All other greatness in subjects is only counterfeit it will not endure the test of danger; the greatness of arms is only real: other greatness burdens a nation with its weight; this supports it with its strength. And as it is the happiness of the age, so it is the peculiar goodness of the best of Kings, that we may praise his subjects without offending him. Doubtless it proceeds from a just confidence of his own virtue, which the lustre of no other can be so great as to darken in him; for the good or the valiant are never safely praised under a bad or a degenerate prince.

But to return from this digression to a farther account of my Poem. I must crave leave to tell you, that as I have endeavoured to adorn it with noble thoughts, so much more to express those thoughts with elocution. The composition 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-distinction) 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 springs the quarry it hunted after; or, without metaphor, which searches over all the memory for the species or ideas of those things which it designs to represent. Wit written is that which is well defined, the happy result 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 consist in the delightful imaging of persons, actions, passions, or things. 'Tis not the jerk or sting of an epigram, nor the seeming contradiction of a poor antithesis,

(the delight of an ill-judging audience in a play of rhyme) nor the gingle of a more poor paranomasia; neither is it so much the morality of a grave sentence, affected by Lucan, but more sparingly used by Virgil; but it is some lively and apt description, dressed in such colours of speech, that it sets before your eyes the absent object as perfectly and more delightfully than nature. So then, the first happiness of the poet's imagination is properly invention, or finding of the thought; the second is fancy, or the variation, deriving or moulding of that thought, as the judgment represents it proper to the subject; the third is elocution, or the art of clothing and adorning that thought, so found and varied, in apt, significant, and sounding words: the quickness of the imagination is seen in the invention, the fertility in the fancy, and the accuracy in the expression. For the two first of these, Ovid is famous amongst the poets; for the latter, Virgil. Ovid images more often the movements and affections of the mind, either combatting between two contrary passions, or extremely discomposed by one: His words, therefore, are the least part of his care; for he pictures Nature in disorder, with which the study and choice of words is inconsistent. This is the proper wit of dialogue or discourse, and consequently of the drama, where all that is said is to be supposed the effect of sudden thought; which, though it exIcludes not the quickness of wit in repartees, yet admits not a too curious election of words, too frequent allusions, or use of tropes, or, in fine, any thing that shows remoteness of thought or labour in the writer. On the other side, Virgil speaks not

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so often to us in the person 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 express 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 describes his Dido well and naturally in the violence of her passions, yet he must yield in that to the Myrrha, the Biblis, the Althea, of Ovid; for, as great an admirer of him as I am, I must acknowledge, that if I see not more of their souls than I see of Dido's; at least, I have a greater concernment for them: and that convinces me that Ovid has touched those tender strokes more delicately than Virgil could. But when action or persons are to be described, when any such image is to be set before us; how bold, how masterly, are the strokes of Virgil! We see the objects he presents us with, in their native figures, in their proper motions; but so we see them, as our own eyes could never have beheld them so beautiful in themselves. We see the soul of the poet, like that universal one of which he speaks, informing and moving through all his pictures:

-Totamque infusa per artus

Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.

We behold him embellishing his images, as he makes Venus breathing beauty upon her son Eneas:

-Lumenque juventa

Purpureum, et lætos oculis afflarat honores:
Quale manus addunt ebori decus, aut ubi flavo
Argentum, Pariusve lapis, circundatur auro.

See his Tempest, his Funeral Sports, his Combat of Turnus and Æneas; and in his Georgics, (which I esteem the divinest part of all his writings,) The Plague, the Country, the Battle of the Bulls, the Labour of the Bees; and those 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 so excellent, that it might be well applied to him which was said by Ovid, Materiam superabat opus.' The very sound of his words has often somewhat that is connatural to the subject; and while we read him, we sit, as in a play, beholding the scenes of what he represents. To perform this, he made frequent use of tropes, which, you know, change the nature of a known word by applying it to some other signification; and this is it which Horace means in his Epistle to the Pisos :

Dixeris egregie, notum si callida verbum
Reddiderit junčtura novum.-

But I am sensible I have presumed too far, to entertain you with a rude discourse of that art which you both know so well, and put into practice with so much happiness. Yet before I leave Virgil, I must own the vanity to tell you, and by you the world, that he has been my master in this Poem: I have followed him every where; I know not with what success, but I am sure with diligence enough: my images are many of them copied from him, and the rest are imitations of him. My expressions also are as near as the idioms of