I have given your lordship but this bare hint--in what verse and in what manner this sort of satire may be best managed. Had I time I could enlarge on the beautiful turns of words and thoughts which are as requisite in this as in heroic poetry itself, of which the satire is undoubtedly a species. With these beautiful turns I confess myself to have been unacquainted till about twenty years ago. In a conversation which I had with that noble wit of Scotland, Sir George Mackenzie, he asked me why I did not imitate in my verses the turns of Mr. Waller and Sir John Denham, of which he repeated many to me.
I had often read with pleasure, and with some profit, those two fathers of our English poetry, but had not seriously enough considered those beauties which give the last perfection to their works. Some sprinklings of this kind I had also formerly in my plays; but they were casual, and not designed. But this hint, thus seasonably given me, first made me sensible of my own wants, and brought me afterwards to seek for the supply of them in other English authors. I looked over the darling of my youth, the famous Cowley; there I found, instead of them, the points of wit and quirks of epigram, even in the "Davideis" (an heroic poem which is of an opposite nature to those puerilities), but no elegant turns, either on the word or on the thought. Then I consulted a greater genius (without offence to the manes of that noble author)--I mean Milton; but as he endeavours everywhere to express Homer, whose age had not arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true sublimity, lofty thoughts which were clothed with admirable Grecisms and ancient words, which he had been digging from the minds of Chaucer and Spenser, and which, with all their rusticity, had somewhat of venerable in them. But I found not there neither that for which I looked. At last I had recourse to his master, Spenser, the author of that immortal poem called the "Faerie Queen," and there I met with that which I had been looking for so long in vain. Spenser had studied Virgil to as much advantage as Milton had done Homer, and amongst the rest of his excellences had copied that. Looking farther into the Italian, I found Tasso had done the same; nay, more, that all the sonnets in that language are on the turn of the first thought--which Mr. Walsh, in his late ingenious preface to his poems, has observed. In short, Virgil and Ovid are the two principal fountains of them in Latin poetry. And the French at this day are so fond of them that they judge them to be the first beauties; delicate, et bien tourne, are the highest commendations which they bestow on somewhat which they think a masterpiece.
An example of the turn of words, amongst a thousand others, is that in the last book of Ovid's "Metamorphoses":-
"Heu! quantum scelus est, in viscera, viscera condi! Congestoque avidum pinguescere corpore corpus; Alteriusque animantem animantis vivere leto."
An example on the turn both of thoughts and words is to be found in Catullus in the complaint of Ariadne when she was left by Theseus:-
"Tum jam nulla viro juranti faemina credat; Nulla viri speret sermones esse fideles; Qui, dum aliquid cupiens animus praegestit apisci, Nil metuunt jurare, nihil promittere parcunt: Sed simul ac cupidae mentis satiata libido est, Dicta nihil metuere, nihil perjuria curant."
An extraordinary turn upon the words is that in Ovid's "Epistolae Heroidum" of Sappho to Phaon:-
"Si, nisi quae forma poterit te digna videri, Nulla futura tua est, nulla futura tua est."
Lastly a turn, which I cannot say is absolutely on words--for the thought turns with them--is in the fourth Georgic of Virgil, where Orpheus is to receive his wife from hell on express condition not to look on her till she was come on earth:-
"Cum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem; Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes."
I will not burthen your lordship with more of them, for I write to a master who understands them better than myself; but I may safely conclude them to be great beauties. I might descend also to the mechanic beauties of heroic verse; but we have yet no English Prosodia, not so much as a tolerable dictionary or a grammar (so that our language is in a manner barbarous); and what Government will encourage any one, or more, who are capable of refining it, I know not: but nothing under a public expense can go through with it. And I rather fear a declination of the language than hope an advancement of it in the present age.
I am still speaking to you, my lord, though in all probability you are already out of hearing. Nothing which my meanness can produce is worthy of this long attention. But I am come to the last petition of Abraham: if there be ten righteous lines in this vast preface, spare it for their sake; and also spare the next city, because it is but a little one.
