So it fets before your eyes the absent object, as perfectly, and more delightfully than nature. then the first happiness of the poet's imagination is properly invention or finding of the thought; the fecond is fancy, or the variation, deriving or moulding of that thought as the judgment reprefents it proper to the fubject; the third is elocution, or the art of cloathing and adorning that thought, fo found and varied, in apt, fignificant, and founding words: the quickness of the imagination is seen in the invention, the fertility in the fancy, and the accuracy in the expreffion.. 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 combating between two contrary paffions, or extremely difcompofed by one. His words therefore are the leaft part of his care; for he pictures nature in diforder, with which the ftudy and choice of words is inconfiftent. This is the proper wit of dialogue or difcourfe, and confequently of the drama, where all that is faid is to be fuppofed the effect of sudden thought; which, though it excludes not the quickness of wit in repartees, yet admits not a top curious election election of words, too frequent allufions, or use of tropes, or in fine any thing that fhews remoteness of thought or labour in the writer. On the other fide, Virgil speaks not 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 exprefs his thoughts with all the graces of elocution, to write more figuratively, and to confefs as well the labour as the force of his imagination. Though he defcribes his Dido well and naturally, in the violence of her paffions, yet he must yield in that to the Myrrha, the Biblis, the Althaea, of Ovid; for as great an admirer of him as I am, I must acknowledge, that if I fee not more of their fouls than I fee 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 perfons are to be described, when any fuch image is to be fet before us, how bold, how masterly are the ftrokes of Virgil! We see the objects he prefents us with in their native figures, in their proper motions; but fo e We we see them, as our own eyes could never have ----Totamque infusa per artus Mens agitat molem, & magno fe corpore mifcet. Webehold him embellishing his images, as he makes lumenque juventa Purpureum, & lætos oculis afflârat honores: See his Tempest, his Funeral Sports, his Combat of Turnus and Æneas: and in his Georgics, which I esteem the divineft 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 fo excellent, that it might be well.applied to him, which was faid by Ovid, Materiam fuperabat opus: the very found of his words has often fomewhat that is connatural to the subject; and while we read him, we fit, as in a play, beholding the scenes of what he reprefents. To perform this, he made frequent ufe of tropes, which you know change the nature of a known word, by applying it to fome other fignification; and this is it which Horace means in his epistle to the Piso's : Dixeris egregiè, notum fi callida verbum you But I am fenfible I have presumed too far to entertain you with a rude difcourfe of that art, which both know fo well, and put into prac-` tice 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 fuccefs, but I am sure with diligence enough: my images are many of them copied from him, and the rest are imitations of to any him. My expreffions alfo are as near as the idioms of the two languages would admit of in tranflation. And this, fir, I have done with that boldness, for which I will stand accountable of our little critics, who, perhaps, are no better acquainted with him than I am. Upon your first perufal of this poem, you have taken notice of fome words, which I have innovated (if it be too bold for me to fay refined) upon his Latin; which, as I offer not to introduce into English prose, so I hope they are neither improper, nor altogether inelegant in verfe; and, in this, Horace will again defend me. Et nova, fictaque nuper, habebunt verba fidem, fi The inference is exceeding plain: for if a Roman poet might have liberty to coin a word, fuppofing only that it was derived from the Greek, was put into a Latin termination, and that he used this liberty but feldom, and with modesty ; how much more juftly may I challenge that privilege to do it with the fame prerequifites, from the best and most judicious of Latin writers? In |