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 inspired me with thoughts above my ordinary level. And I am well satisfied, that as they 5 are incomparably the best subject I have 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 to of praise, and I have exalted them and made them fruitful; but here—Omnia sponte sua 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 15 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 is it the peculiar goodness of the best of kings, that we may praise his subjects 20 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 25 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 30 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 35 it designs to represent. Wit written is that which is well defined the happy result of thought, or product of that 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 jingle of a more poor paronomasia; neither is it so much 5 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 10 poet's imagination is properly invention, or finding of the thought; the second is fancy, or the variation, driving, 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 15 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 20 affections of the mind, either combating 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, 25 and consequently of the drama, where all that is said is to be supposed the effect of sudden thought; which, though it excludes 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 anything that shows remoteness 30 of thought or labour in the writer. On the other side, 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 express his thoughts with all the graces of elocution, to write more 35 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 Byblis, 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 con5 vinces 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 represents us within their native figures, in 10 their proper motions; but we so see them as our own eyes 15 20 25 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 Æneas: 'Lumenque juventæ Purpureum et lætos oculis afflarat honores: 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 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 30 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 35 nature of a known word by applying it to some other signi fication; and this is it which Horace means in his Epistle to the Pisos: 'Dixeris egregie, notum si callida verbum But I am sensible I have presumed too far to entertain you 5 'Et nova fictaque nuper habebunt verba fidem si 25 The inference is exceeding plain; for if a Roman poet might have liberty to coin a word, supposing only that it was derived from the Greek, was put into a Latin termination, and that he used this liberty but seldom and with modesty; how much more justly may I challenge that privi- 30 lege to do it with the same pre-requisites, from the best and most judicious of Latin writers? In some places, where either the fancy or the words were his or any other's, I have noted it in the margin, that I might not seem a plagiary; in others I have neglected it, to avoid as well tediousness 35 as the affectation of doing it too often. Such descriptions or images, well wrought, which I promise not for mine, are, as I have said, the adequate delight of heroic poesy; for they beget admiration, which is its proper object; as the images of the burlesque, which is contrary to this, by the same reason beget laughter; for the one shows nature 5 beautified, as in the picture of a fair woman, which we all admire; the other shows her deformed, as in that of a lazar, or of a fool with distorted face and antic gestures, at which we cannot forbear to laugh, because it is a deviation from nature. But though the same images serve equally to for the epic poesy, and for the historic and panegyric, which are branches of it, yet a several sort of sculpture is to be used in them. If some of them are to be like those of Juvenal, Stantes in curribus Æmiliani, heroes drawn in their triumphal chariots and in their full proportion; others are 15 to be like that of Virgil, Spirantia mollius æra: there is somewhat more of softness and tenderness to be shown in them. You will soon find I write not this without concern. Some, who have seen a paper of verses which I wrote last year to her Highness the Duchess, have accused them of that 20 only thing I could defend in them. They have said, I did bumi serpere, that I wanted not only height of fancy, but dignity of words to set it off. I might well answer with that of Horace, Nunc non erat his locus; I knew I addressed them to a lady, and accordingly I affected the softness of 25 expression and the smoothness of measure, rather than the height of thought; and in what I did endeavour, it is no vanity to say I have succeeded. I detest arrogance; but there is some difference betwixt that and a just defence. But I will not farther bribe your candour, or the reader's. 30 I leave them to speak for me; and, if they can, to make out that character, not pretending to a greater, which I have given them. |