DRYDEN. 327 



than Voltaire,&quot; said Home Tooke, and perhaps it is true 

 that he had a broader view, though his learning was neither 

 so extensive nor so accurate. My space will not afford 

 many extracts, but I cannot forbear one or two. He says 

 of Chaucer, that &quot; he is a perpetual fountain of good sense,&quot;* 

 and likes him better than Ovid, a bold confession in tha* 

 day. He prefers the pastorals of Theocritus to those o^ 

 Virgil. &quot; Virgil s shepherds are too well-read in the philo 

 sophy of Epicurus and of Plato ; &quot; &quot; there is a kind of 

 rusticity in all those pompous verses, somewhat of a holi 

 day shepherd strutting in his country buskins ; &quot;+ 

 &quot; Theocritus is softer than Ovid, he touches the passions 

 more delicately, and performs all this out of his own fund, 

 without diving into the arts and sciences for a supply. 

 Even his Doric dialect has an incomparable sweetness in 

 his clownishness, like a fair shepherdess, in her country 

 russet, talking in a Yorkshire tone.&quot;J Comparing Virgil s 

 verse with that of some poets, he says, that his &quot; numbers 

 are perpetually varied to increase the delight of the reader, 

 so that the same sounds are never repeated twice together. 

 On the contrary, Ovid and Claudian, though they write in 

 styles different from each other, yet have each of them but 

 one sort of music in their verses. All the versification and 

 little variety of Claudian is included within the compass of 

 four or five lines, and then he begins in the same tenor, 

 perpetually closing his sense at the end of a verse and that 

 verse commonly which they call golden, or two substantives 

 and two adjectives with a verb betwixt them to keep the 

 peace. Ovid, with all his sweetness, has as little variety of 

 numbers and sound as he ; he is always, as it were, upon the 

 hand-gallop, and his verse runs upon carpet-ground. &quot; 

 What a dreary half-century would have been saved to 

 English poetry, could Pope have laid these sentences to 

 heart ! Upon translation, no one has written so much 

 and so well as Dryden in his various prefaces. Whatever 

 has been said since is either expansion or variation of what 



* Preface to Fables. t Dedication of the Georgics. 



J Preface to second Miscellany. Ibid. 



