by all the poets of the Augustan age. His way of expressing and applying them, not his invention of them, is what we are chiefly to admire.

For this reason I think there is nothing in the world so tiresome as the works of those critics who write in a positive dogmatic way, without either language, genius, or imagination. If the reader would see how the best of the Latin critics wrote, he may find their manner very beautifully described in the characters of Horace, Petronius, Quintilian, and Longinus, as they are drawn in the essay of which I am now speaking.

Since I have mentioned Longinus, who in his reflections has given us the same kind of sublime, which he observes in the several passages that occasioned them; I cannot but take notice that our English author has after the same manner exemplified several of his precepts in the very precepts themselves. I shall produce two or three instances of this kind. Speaking of the insipid smoothness which some readers are so much in love with, he has the following verses:

These equal syllables alone require,
Though oft the ear the open vowels tire,
While expletives their feeble aid do join,
And ten low words oft creep in one dull line.

The gaping of the vowels in the second line, the expletive 'do' in the third, and the ten monosyllables in the fourth, give such a beauty to this passage, as would have been very much admired in an ancient poet. The reader may observe the following lines in the same view:

A needless Alexandrine ends the song,

That like a wounded snake drags its slow length along.

*See Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, sect. III. p. 97. 2d. 1768.

And afterwards,

"Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense,
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows:
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,

The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar.
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,

Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main." The beautiful distich upon Ajax in the foregoing lines puts me in mind of a description in Homer's Odyssey, which none of the critics have ta ken notice of. It is where Sisyphus is represented lifting his stone up the hill, which is no sooner carried to the top of it, but it immediately tumbles to the bottom. This double motion of the stone is admirably described in the numbers of these verses; as in the four first it is heaved up1 by several spondees intermixed with proper breathing places, and at last trundles down in a continued line of dactyls:

Καὶ μὴν Σίσυφον εἰσεῖδον, κρατέρ ̓ ἄλγε ̓ ἔχοντα,
Λᾶαν βασάζοντα πελώριον ἀμφοτέρησιν.
Ἤτοι ὁ μὲν σκηριπλόμενος χερσίν τε ποσίν τε,
· Λᾶαν ἄνω ωθεσκε πολὶ λοφον· ἄλλ ̓ ὅτε μέλλοι
Ακρον ὑπερβαλέειν, τότ' ἀποτρέψασκε Κραταιίς,
Αὐτις ἔπειτα πέδονδε κυλίνδετο λάας αναιδής.

ODYSS. 1. 11.

I turn'd my eye, and as I turn'd survey'd
A mournful vision! the Sisyphian shade:
With many a weary step, and many a groan,
Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone:
The huge round stone, resulting with a bound,
Thundera impetuous down, and smokes along the ground.

POPE.

It would be endless to quote verses out of Vir gil which have this particular kind of beauty in

the numbers; but I may take an occasion in a future paper to shew several of them which have escaped the observation of others.

I cannot conclude this paper without taking notice that we have three poems in our tongue, which are of the same nature, and each of them a masterpiece in its kind; the* Essay on Translated Verse, the Essay on the Art of Poetry, and the Essay upon Criticism.

*By the Earl of Roscommon.

C.

END OF VOL. IV.