other testimony than that of Ovid, his contemporary:

Nec pars ulla magis legitur de corpore toto,

Quam non legitimo fœdere junctus amor.

Where by the way, you may observe, my Lord, that Ovid in those words, non legitimo fædere junctus amor, will by no means allow it to be a lawful marriage betwixt Dido and Æneas. He was in banishment when he wrote those verses, which I cite from his letter to Augustus. You, Sir, saith he, have sent me into exile for writing my ART OF LOVE, and my wanton Elegies; yet your own poet was happy in your good graces, though he brought Dido and Æneas into a cave, and left them there not over-honestly together: may I be so bold to ask your majesty, is it a greater fault to teach the art of unlawful love, than to shew it in the action? But was Ovid, the court-poet, so bad a courtier, as to find no other plea to excuse himself, than by a plain accusation of his master? Virgil confessed it was a lawful marriage betwixt the lovers; that Juno, the goddess of matrimony, had ratified it by her presence; for it was her business to bring matters to that issue: that the ceremonies were short we may believe, for Dido was not only amorous, but a widow. Mercury himself, though employed on a quite contrary errand, yet owns it a marriage by an inuendo,— pulchramque uxorius urbem extruis. He calls Æneas not only a husband, but upbraids him for being a fond husband, as the word uxorius implies. Now mark a little, if your Lordship pleases, why Virgil

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is so much concerned to make this marriage* (for he seems to be the father of the bride himself, and to give her to the bridegroom); it was to make way for the divorce which he intended afterwards; for he was a finer flatterer than Ovid; and I more than conjecture, that he had in his eye the divorce, which not long before had passed betwixt the Emperor and Scribonia. He drew this dimple in the cheek of Æneas, to prove Augustus of the same family, by so remarkable a feature in the same place. Thus, as we say Thus, as we say in our homespun English proverb, he killed two birds with one stone; pleased the emperor, by giving him the resemblance of his ancestor, and gave him such a resemblance as was not scandalous in that age for to leave one wife and take another, was but a matter of gallantry at that time of day among the Romans. Neque hæc in fœdera veni, is the very excuse which Æneas makes, when he leaves his lady. I made no such bargain with you at our marriage, to live always drudging on at Carthage; my business was Italy, and I never made a secret of it. If I took my pleasure, had

* Here certainly our author strains a point. Virgil's own testimony is against him. Nec conjugis unquam prætendi tædas, says Æneas to Dido.

7 Augustus was divorced from his second wife, Scribonia, in the year of Rome 715, after having lived with her about a year; and shortly afterwards he married Livia, who was then pregnant by her husband, Tiberius, whom he compelled to resign her.

See Heyne's remark, p. 488.

not you your share of it? I leave you free at my departure, to comfort yourself with the next stranger who happens to be shipwrecked on your coast; be as kind an hostess as you have been to me, and you can never fail of another husband. In the mean time, I call the gods to witness, that I leave your shore unwillingly; for though Juno made the marriage, yet Jupiter commands me to forsake you. This is the effect of what he saith, when it is dishonoured out of Latin verse into English prose. If the poet argued not aright, we must pardon him for a poor blind heathen, who knew no better morals.

I have detained your Lordship longer than I intended on this objection, which would indeed weigh something in a Spiritual Court; but I am not to defend our poet there. The next I think is but a cavil, though the cry is great against him, and hath continued from the time of Macrobius to this present age: I hinted it before. They lay no less than want of invention to his charge; a capital charge, I must acknowledge: for a poet is a maker, as the word signifies, and who cannot make, that is, invent, hath his name for nothing. That which makes this accusation look so strong at the first sight, is, that he has borrowed

9 Both the copies printed in our author's life-time, as well as the modern editions, here read-"That which makes this accusation look so strange," &c. It was clearly an errour of the press in the first edition, which was implicitly followed in all subsequent. From a passage in one of our author's letters, it should seem that he

so many things from Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, and others who preceded him. But in the first place, if invention is to be taken in so strict a sense, that the matter of a poem must be wholly new, and that in all its parts, then Scaliger hath made out, saith Segrais, that the history of Troy was no more the invention of Homer, than of Virgil. There was not an old woman, or almost a child, but had it in their mouths, before the Greek poet or his friends digested it into this admirable order in which we read it. At this rate, as Solomon hath told us, there is nothing new beneath the sun. Who then can pass for an inventor, if Homer as well as Virgil must be deprived of that glory? Is Versailles the less a new building, because the architect of that palace hath imitated others which were built before it? Walls, doors and windows, apartments, offices, rooms of convenience and magnificence, are in all great houses. So descriptions, figures, fables, and the rest, must be in all heroick poems; they are the common materials of poetry, furnished from the magazine of nature: every poet hath as much right to them as every man hath to air or water:

Quid prohibetis aquas? Usus communis aquarum est.

did not himself correct the proof-sheets of his work, as they passed through the press; but having corrected such errours as struck him, in the first edition of his Virgil, left his emendations to their fate. Here, however, I believe the misprint (for so it must have been) wholly escaped him. The same words are more than once confounded in the early editions of Shakspeare's plays.

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principal action, the oeconomy and disposition of it,these are the things which distinguish copies from orignals. The poet who borrows nothing from others, is yet to be born; he and the Jews Messias will come together. There are parts of the Æneis which resemble some parts both of the Ilias and of the Odysses; as for example, Æneas descended into Hell, and Ulysses had been there before him: Æneas loved Dido, and Ulysses loved Calypso in few words, Virgil hath imitated Homer's Odysses in his first six books, and in his six last the Ilias. But from hence can we infer that the two poets write the same history? Is there no invention in some other parts of Virgil's Aneis? Jo The disposition of so many various matters, is not that his own? From what book of Homer had Virgil his episode of Nysus and Euryalus, of Mezentius and Lausus? From whence did he borrow his design of bringing Æneas into Italy? of establishing the Roman empire on the foundations of a Trojan colony? to say nothing of the - honour he did his patron, not only in his descent→ from Venus, but in making him so like her in his best features, that the goddess might have mistaken Augustus for her son. He had indeed the story from common fame, as Homer had his from the Egyptian priestess. Æneadum Genetrix was no more unknown to Lucretius than to him. But Lucretius taught him not to form his hero; to give him piety or valour for his manners; and both in so eminent a degree, that having done

* Not here, is the next sheet is not yet made up.