Discourses on Satire and on Epic Poetry

You may please also to observe that there is not, to the best of my remembrance, one vowel gaping on another for want of a cæsura in this whole poem. But where a vowel ends a wo...

To love our native country, and to study its benefit and its glory; to be interested in its concerns, is natural to all men, and is indeed our common duty. A poet makes a farthe...

DRYDEN’S discourses upon Satire and Epic Poetry belong to the latter years of his life, and represent maturer thought than is to be found in his “Essay of Dramatic Poesie.” That...

Mere fustian (as Horace would tell you from behind, without pressing forward), and more smoke than fire. Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto would cry out, “Make room for the Italian po...

There is another thing in which I have presumed to deviate from him and Spenser. They both make hemistichs, or half-verses, breaking off in the middle of a line. I confess there...

They who will not grant me that pleasure is one of the ends of poetry, but that it is only a means of compassing the only end (which is instruction), must yet allow that without...

I said only from Ennius, but I may safely carry it higher, as far as Livius Andronicus, who, as I have said formerly, taught the first play at Rome in the year _ab urbe conditâ_...

This is the first similitude which Virgil makes in this poem, and one of the longest in the whole, for which reason I the rather cite it. While the storm was in its fury, any al...

It is manifest that some particular ages have been more happy than others in the production of great men in all sorts of arts and sciences, as that of Euripides, Sophocles, Aris...

A man who is resolved to praise an author with any appearance of justice must be sure to take him on the strongest side, and where he is least liable to exceptions; he is theref...

Of the other parts which compose his character as a king or as a general I need say nothing; the whole “Æneis” is one continued instance of some one or other of them; and where...

Thus, my lord, I have, as briefly as I could, given your lordship, and by you the world, a rude draught of what I have been long labouring in my imagination, and what I had inte...

But to proceed: Dacier justly taxes Casaubon for saying that the satires of Lucilius were wholly different in species from those of Ennius and Pacuvius, Casaubon was led into th...

After all, Horace had the disadvantage of the times in which he lived; they were better for the man, but worse for the satirist. It is generally said that those enormous vices w...

The story of this Cyclops, whose name was Polyphemus (so famous in the Grecian fables), was that Ulysses, who with his company was driven on the coast of Sicily, where those Cyc...

Being invited by that worthy gentleman, Sir William Bowyer, to Denham Court, I translated the first Georgic at his house and the greatest part of the last Æneid. A more friendly...