Discourses on Satire Epic Poetry | Page 8

their owners'
marks about them. There is some peculiar awkwardness, false grammar,

imperfect sense, or, at the least, obscurity; some brand or other on this
buttock or that ear that it is notorious who are the owners of the cattle,
though they should not sign it with their names. But your lordship, on
the contrary, is distinguished not only by the excellency of your
thoughts, but by your style and manner of expressing them. A painter
judging of some admirable piece may affirm with certainty that it was
of Holbein or Vandyck; but vulgar designs and common draughts are
easily mistaken and misapplied. Thus, by my long study of your
lordship, I am arrived at the knowledge of your particular manner. In
the good poems of other men, like those artists, I can only say, "This is
like the draught of such a one, or like the colouring of another;" in short,
I can only be sure that it is the hand of a good master: but in your
performances it is scarcely possible for me to be deceived. If you write
in your strength, you stand revealed at the first view, and should you
write under it, you cannot avoid some peculiar graces which only cost
me a second consideration to discover you: for I may say it with all the
severity of truth, that every line of yours is precious. Your lordship's
only fault is that you have not written more, unless I could add another,
and that yet greater, but I fear for the public the accusation would not
be true--that you have written, and out of a vicious modesty will not
publish.
Virgil has confined his works within the compass of eighteen thousand
lines, and has not treated many subjects, yet he ever had, and ever will
have, the reputation of the best poet. Martial says of him that he could
have excelled Varius in tragedy and Horace in lyric poetry, but out of
deference to his friends he attempted neither.
The same prevalence of genius is in your lordship, but the world cannot
pardon your concealing it on the same consideration, because we have
neither a living Varius nor a Horace, in whose excellences both of
poems, odes, and satires, you had equalled them, if our language had
not yielded to the Roman majesty, and length of time had not added a
reverence to the works of Horace. For good sense is the same in all or
most ages, and course of time rather improves nature than impairs her.
What has been, may be again; another Homer and another Virgil may
possible arise from those very causes which produced the first, though

it would be impudence to affirm that any such have yet appeared.
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, Aristophanes, and the rest, for
stage-poetry amongst the Greeks; that of Augustus for heroic, lyric,
dramatic, elegiac, and indeed all sorts of poetry in the persons of Virgil,
Horace, Varius, Ovid, and many others, especially if we take into that
century the latter end of the commonwealth, wherein we find Varro,
Lucretius, and Catullus; and at the same time lived Cicero and Sallust
and Caesar. A famous age in modern times for learning in every kind
was that of Lorenzo de Medici and his son Leo the Tenth, wherein
painting was revived, and poetry flourished, and the Greek language
was restored.
Examples in all these are obvious, but what I would infer is this-- that
in such an age it is possible some great genius may arise to equal any of
the ancients, abating only for the language; for great contemporaries
whet and cultivate each other, and mutual borrowing and commerce
makes the common riches of learning, as it does of the civil
government.
But suppose that Homer and Virgil were the only of their species, and
that nature was so much worn out in producing them that she is never
able to hear the like again, yet the example only holds in heroic poetry;
in tragedy and satire I offer myself to maintain, against some of our
modern critics, that this age and the last, particularly in England, have
excelled the ancients in both those kinds, and I would instance in
Shakespeare of the former, of your lordship in the latter sort.
Thus I might safely confine myself to my native country. But if I would
only cross the seas, I might find in France a living Horace and a
Juvenal in the person of the admirable Boileau, whose numbers are
excellent, whose expressions are noble, whose thoughts are just, whose
language is pure, whose satire is pointed and whose sense