Part 23

But hold, my Muse! thy needless flight restrain, Unless, like him, thou could'st a verse indite: To think his fancy to describe, is vain, Since nothing can discover light, but light.

X.

'Tis want of genius that does more deny; 'Tis fear my praise should make your glory less; And, therefore, like the modest painter, I Must draw the veil, where I cannot express.

HENRY GRAHME.

TO

MR DRYDEN.

No undisputed monarch governed yet, With universal sway, the realms of wit: Nature could never such expence afford; Each several province owned a several lord. A poet then had his poetic wife, One Muse embraced, and married for his life. By the stale thing his appetite was cloyed, His fancy lessened, and his fire destroyed. But Nature, grown extravagantly kind, With all her treasures did adorn your mind; The different powers were then united found, And you wit's universal monarch crowned. Your mighty sway your great desert secures; And every Muse and every Grace is yours. To none confined, by turns you all enjoy: Sated with this, you to another fly, So, sultan-like, in your seraglio stand, While wishing Muses wait for your command; Thus no decay, no want of vigour, find: Sublime your fancy, boundless is your mind. Not all the blasts of Time can do you wrong-- Young, spite of age--in spite of weakness, strong. Time, like Alcides, strikes you to the ground; You, like Antæus, from each fall rebound.

H. ST. JOHN.

TO

MR DRYDEN,

ON

_HIS VIRGIL_.

'Tis said, that Phidias gave such living grace To the carved image of a beauteous face, That the cold marble might even seem to be The life--and the true life, the imagery.

You pass that artist, Sir, and all his powers, Making the best of Roman poets ours, With such effect, we know not which to call The imitation, which the original.

What Virgil lent, you pay in equal weight; The charming beauty of the coin no less; And such the majesty of your impress, You seem the very author you translate.

'Tis certain, were he now alive with us, And did revolving destiny constrain To dress his thoughts in English o'er again, Himself could write no otherwise than thus.

His old encomium never did appear So true as now: "Romans and Greeks, submit! Something of late is in our language writ, More nobly great than the famed Iliads were."

JA. WRIGHT.

TO

MR DRYDEN,

ON

_HIS TRANSLATIONS_.

As flowers, transplanted from a southern sky, But hardly bear, or in the raising die, Missing their native sun,--at best retain But a faint odour, and but live with pain; So Roman poetry, by moderns taught, } Wanting the warmth with which its author wrote, } Is a dead image, and a worthless draught. } While we transfuse, the nimble spirit flies, Escapes unseen, evaporates, and dies. Who then attempts to shew the ancients' wit, Must copy with the genius that they writ: Whence we conclude from thy translated song, So just, so warm, so smooth, and yet so strong, Thou heavenly charmer! soul of harmony! That all their geniuses revived in thee. Thy trumpet sounds: the dead are raised to light; New-born they rise, and take to heaven their flight; Deck'd in thy verse, as clad with rays, they shine, All glorified, immortal, and divine. As Britain, in rich soil abounding wide, Furnished for use, for luxury, and pride, Yet spreads her wanton sails on every shore, For foreign wealth, insatiate still of more; To her own wool, the silks of Asia joins, And to her plenteous harvests, Indian mines; So Dryden, not contented with the fame Of his own works, though an immortal name---- To lands remote he sends his learned Muse, The noblest seeds of foreign wit to chuse. Feasting our sense so many various ways, Say, is't thy bounty, or thy thirst of praise, That, by comparing others, all might see, Who most excelled, are yet excelled by thee?

GEORGE GRANVILLE.

FOOTNOTES:

[269] Essay of Translated Verse, p. 26.

THE

LIFE

OF

PUBLIUS VIRGILIUS MARO,

BY KNIGHTLY CHETWOOD, D.D.[270]

Virgil was born at Mantua, which city was built no less than three hundred years before Rome, and was the capital of the New Hetruria, as himself, no less antiquary than poet, assures us. His birth is said to have happened in the first consulship of Pompey the Great, and Licinius Crassus: but, since the relater of this presently after contradicts himself, and Virgil's manner of addressing to Octavius implies a greater difference of age than that of seven years, as appears by his First Pastoral, and other places, it is reasonable to set the date of it something backward; and the writer of his Life having no certain memorials to work upon, seems to have pitched upon the two most illustrious consuls he could find about that time, to signalize the birth of so eminent a man. But it is beyond all question, that he was born on or near the 15th of October, which day was kept festival in honour of his memory by the Latin, as the birth-day of Homer was by the Greek poets. And so near a resemblance there is betwixt the lives of these two famous epic writers, that Virgil seems to have followed the fortune of the other, as well as the subject and manner of his writing. For Homer is said to have been of very mean parents, such as got their bread by day-labour; so is Virgil. Homer is said to be base-born; so is Virgil. The former to have been born in the open air, in a ditch, or by the bank of a river; so is the latter. There was a poplar planted near the place of Virgil's birth, which suddenly grew up to an unusual height and bulk, and to which the superstitious neighbourhood attributed marvellous virtue: Homer had his poplar too, as Herodotus relates, which was visited with great veneration. Homer is described by one of the ancients to have been of a slovenly and neglected mien and habit; so was Virgil. Both were of a very delicate and sickly constitution; both addicted to travel, and the study of astrology; both had their compositions usurped by others; both envied and traduced during their lives. We know not so much as the true names of either of them with any exactness; for the critics are not yet agreed how the word _Virgil_ should be written, and of Homer's name there is no certainty at all. Whosoever shall consider this parallel in so many particulars, (and more might be added,) would be inclined to think, that either the same stars ruled strongly at the nativities of them both; or, what is a great deal more probable, that the Latin grammarians, wanting materials for the former part of Virgil's life, after the legendary fashion, supplied it out of Herodotus; and, like ill face-painters, not being able to hit the true features, endeavoured to make amends by a great deal of impertinent landscape and drapery.

Without troubling the reader with needless quotations now, or afterwards, the most probable opinion is, that Virgil was the son of a servant, or assistant, to a wandering astrologer, who practised physic: for _medicus_, _magus_, as Juvenal observes, usually went together; and this course of life was followed by a great many Greeks and Syrians, of one of which nations it seems not improbable that Virgil's father was. Nor could a man of that profession have chosen a fitter place to settle in, than that most superstitious tract of Italy, which, by her ridiculous rites and ceremonies, as much enslaved the Romans, as the Romans did the Hetrurians by their arms. This man, therefore, having got together some money, which stock he improved by his skill in planting and husbandry, had the good fortune, at last, to marry his master's daughter, by whom he had Virgil: and this woman seems, by her mother's side, to have been of good extraction; for she was nearly related to Quintilius Varus, whom Paterculus assures us to have been of an illustrious, though not patrician, family; and there is honourable mention made of it in the history of the second Carthaginian war. It is certain, that they gave him very good education; to which they were inclined, not so much by the dreams of his mother, and those presages which Donatus relates, as by the early indications which he gave of a sweet disposition and excellent wit. He passed the first seven years of his life at Mantua, not seventeen, as Scaliger miscorrects his author; for the _initia ætatis_ can hardly be supposed to extend so far. From thence he removed to Cremona, a noble Roman colony, and afterwards to Milan; in all which places, he prosecuted his studies with great application. He read over all the best Latin and Greek authors; for which he had convenience by the no remote distance of Marseilles, that famous Greek colony, which maintained its politeness and purity of language in the midst of all those barbarous nations amongst which it was seated; and some tincture of the latter seems to have descended from them down to the modern French. He frequented the most eminent professors of the Epicurean philosophy, which was then much in vogue, and will be always, in declining and sickly states.[271] But, finding no satisfactory account from his master Syron, he passed over to the Academic school; to which he adhered the rest of his life, and deserved, from a great emperor, the title of--_The Plato of Poets_. He composed at leisure hours a great number of verses on various subjects; and, desirous rather of a great than early fame, he permitted his kinsman and fellow-student, Varus, to derive the honour of one of his tragedies to himself. Glory, neglected in proper time and place, returns often with large increase: and so he found it; for Varus afterwards proved a great instrument of his rise. In short, it was here that he formed the plan, and collected the materials, of all those excellent pieces which he afterwards finished, or was forced to leave less perfect by his death. But, whether it were the unwholesomeness of his native air, of which he somewhere complains; or his too great abstinence, and night-watchings at his study, to which he was always addicted, as Augustus observes; or possibly the hopes of improving himself by travel--he resolved to remove to the more southern tract of Italy; and it was hardly possible for him not to take Rome in his way, as is evident to any one who shall cast an eye on the map of Italy. And therefore the late French editor of his works is mistaken, when he asserts, that he never saw Rome till he came to petition for his estate. He gained the acquaintance of the master of the horse to Octavius, and cured a great many diseases of horses, by methods they had never heard of. It fell out, at the same time, that a very fine colt, which promised great strength and speed, was presented to Octavius; Virgil assured them, that he came of a faulty mare, and would prove a jade: Upon trial, it was found as he had said. His judgment proved right in several other instances; which was the more surprising, because the Romans knew least of natural causes of any civilized nation in the world; and those meteors and prodigies, which cost them incredible sums to expiate, might easily have been accounted for by no very profound naturalist. It is no wonder, therefore, that Virgil was in so great reputation, as to be at last introduced to Octavius himself. That prince was then at variance with Marc Antony, who vexed him with a great many libelling letters, in which he reproaches him with the baseness of his parentage, that he came of a scrivener, a rope-maker, and a baker, as Suetonius tells us. Octavius finding that Virgil had passed so exact a judgment upon the breed of dogs and horses, thought that he possibly might be able to give him some light concerning his own. He took him into his closet, where they continued in private a considerable time. Virgil was a great mathematician; which, in the sense of those times, took in astrology; and, if there be any thing in that art, (which I can hardly believe,) if that be true which the ingenious De la Chambre asserts confidently, that, from the marks on the body, the configuration of the planets at a nativity may be gathered, and the marks might be told by knowing the nativity, never had one of those artists a fairer opportunity to show his skill than Virgil now had; for Octavius had moles upon his body, exactly resembling the constellation called _Ursa Major_. But Virgil had other helps; the predictions of Cicero and Catulus,[272] and that vote of the senate had gone abroad, that no child, born at Rome in the year of his nativity, should be bred up, because the seers assured them that an emperor was born that year. Besides this, Virgil had heard of the Assyrian and Egyptian prophecies, (which, in truth, were no other but the Jewish,) that about that time a great king was to come into the world. Himself takes notice of them, (Æn. VI.) where he uses a very significant word, now in all liturgies, _hujus in adventu_; so in another place, _adventu propiore Dei_.

At his foreseen approach already quake Assyrian kingdoms, and Mæotis' lake; Nile hears him knocking at his seven-fold gate.

Every one knows whence this was taken. It was rather a mistake than impiety in Virgil, to apply these prophecies, which belonged to the Saviour of the world, to the person of Octavius; it being a usual piece of flattery, for near a hundred years together, to attribute them to their emperors and other great men. Upon the whole matter, it is very probable, that Virgil predicted to him the empire at this time. And it will appear yet the more, if we consider, that he assures him of his being received into the number of the gods, in his First Pastoral, long before the thing came to pass; which prediction seems grounded upon his former mistake. This was a secret not to be divulged at that time; and therefore it is no wonder that the slight story in Donatus was given abroad to palliate the matter. But certain it is, that Octavius dismissed him with great marks of esteem, and earnestly recommended the protection of Virgil's affairs to Pollio, then lieutenant of the Cisalpine Gaul, where Virgil's patrimony lay. This Pollio, from a mean original, became one of the most considerable persons of his time; a good general, orator, statesman, historian, poet, and favourer of learned men; above all, he was a man of honour in those critical times. He had joined with Octavius and Antony in revenging the barbarous assassination of Julius Cæsar; when they two were at variance, he would neither follow Antony, whose courses he detested, nor join with Octavius against him, out of a grateful sense of some former obligations. Augustus, who thought it his interest to oblige men of principles, notwithstanding this, received him afterwards into favour, and promoted him to the highest honours. And thus much I thought fit to say of Pollio, because he was one of Virgil's greatest friends. Being therefore eased of domestic cares, he pursues his journey to Naples. The charming situation of that place, and view of the beautiful villas of the Roman nobility, equaling the magnificence of the greatest kings; the neighbourhood of Baiæ, whither the sick resorted for recovery, and the statesman when he was politicly sick; whither the wanton went for pleasure, and witty men for good company; the wholesomeness of the air, and improving conversation, the best air of all, contributed not only to the re-establishing his health, but to the forming of his style, and rendering him master of that happy turn of verse, in which he much surpasses all the Latins, and, in a less advantageous language, equals even Homer himself. He proposed to use his talent in poetry, only for scaffolding to build a convenient fortune, that he might prosecute, with less interruption, those nobler studies to which his elevated genius led him, and which he describes in these admirable lines:

_Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musæ, Quarum sacra fero ingenti percussus amore, Accipiant; cælique vias, et sidera, monstrent, Defectus Solis varios, Lunæque labores; Unde tremor terris_, &c.

But the current of that martial age, by some strange antiperistasis, drove so violently towards poetry, that he was at last carried down with the stream; for not only the young nobility, but Octavius, and Pollio, Cicero in his old age, Julius Cæsar, and the stoical Brutus, a little before, would needs be tampering with the Muses. The two latter had taken great care to have their poems curiously bound, and lodged in the most famous libraries; but neither the sacredness of those places, nor the greatness of their names, could preserve ill poetry. Quitting therefore the study of the law, after having pleaded but one cause with indifferent success, he resolved to push his fortune this way, which he seems to have discontinued for some time; and that may be the reason why the _Culex_, his first pastoral now extant, has little besides the novelty of the subject, and the moral of the fable, which contains an exhortation to gratitude, to recommend it. Had it been as correct as his other pieces, nothing more proper and pertinent could have at that time been addressed to the young Octavius; for, the year in which he presented it, probably at Baiæ, seems to be the very same in which that prince consented (though with seeming reluctance) to the death of Cicero, under whose consulship he was born, the preserver of his life, and chief instrument of his advancement. There is no reason to question its being genuine, as the late French editor does; its meanness, in comparison of Virgil's other works, (which is that writer's only objection,) confutes himself; for Martial, who certainly saw the true copy, speaks of it with contempt; and yet that pastoral equals, at least, the address to the Dauphin, which is prefixed to the late edition. Octavius, to unbend his mind from application to public business, took frequent turns to Baiæ, and Sicily, where he composed his poem called _Sicelides_, which Virgil seems to allude to in the pastoral beginning _Sicelides Musæ_. This gave him opportunity of refreshing that prince's memory of him; and about that time he wrote his _Ætna_. Soon after he seems to have made a voyage to Athens, and at his return presented his _Ceiris_, a more elaborate piece, to the noble and eloquent Messala. The forementioned author groundlessly taxes this as supposititious; for, besides other critical marks, there are no less than fifty or sixty verses, altered, indeed, and polished, which he inserted in the Pastorals, according to his fashion; and from thence they were called _Eclogues_, or _Select Bucolics_: we thought fit to use a title more intelligible, the reason of the other being ceased; and we are supported by Virgil's own authority, who expressly calls them _carmina pastorum_. The French editor is again mistaken, in asserting, that the _Ceiris_ is borrowed from the ninth of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_: he might have more reasonably conjectured it to be taken from Parthenius, the Greek poet, from whom Ovid borrowed a great part of his work. But it is indeed taken from neither, but from that learned, unfortunate poet, Apollonius Rhodius, to whom Virgil is more indebted than to any other Greek writer, excepting Homer. The reader will be satisfied of this, if he consults that author in his own language; for the translation is a great deal more obscure than the original.

Whilst Virgil thus enjoyed the sweets of a learned privacy, the troubles of Italy cut off his little subsistence; but, by a strange turn of human affairs, which ought to keep good men from ever despairing, the loss of his estate proved the effectual way of making his fortune. The occasion of it was this: Octavius, as himself relates, when he was but nineteen years of age, by a masterly stroke of policy, had gained the veteran legions into his service, and, by that step, outwitted all the republican senate. They grew now very clamorous for their pay; the treasury being exhausted, he was forced to make assignments upon land; and none but in Italy itself would content them. He pitched upon Cremona, as the most distant from Rome; but that not sufficing, he afterwards threw in part of the state of Mantua. Cremona was a rich and noble colony, settled a little before the invasion of Hannibal. During that tedious and bloody war, they had done several important services to the commonwealth; and, when eighteen other colonies, pleading poverty and depopulation, refused to contribute money, or to raise recruits, they of Cremona voluntarily paid a double quota of both. But past services are a fruitless plea; civil wars are one continued act of ingratitude. In vain did the miserable mothers, with their famishing infants in their arms, fill the streets with their numbers, and the air with lamentations; the craving legions were to be satisfied at any rate. Virgil, involved in the common calamity, had recourse to his old patron, Pollio; but he was, at this time, under a cloud; however, compassionating so worthy a man, not of a make to struggle through the world, he did what he could, and recommended him to Mæcenas, with whom he still kept a private correspondence. The name of this great man being much better known than one part of his character, the reader, I presume, will not be displeased if I supply it in this place.