and expostulations, which flow, as in a continued stream of grief, from the first discovery of her heart to her sister, to her last frantic and inflamed resentments. These belong to the former article of internal movements: and need not be considered. My concern at present, is with those visible, external indications, the sensible marks and signatures (as expressed in look, air, and action) of this tormenting frenzy. The history of these, as related in the narrative part of Dido's adventure, would comprehend every natural situation of a person, under love's distractions. And it were no unpleasing amusement to follow and contemplate her, in a series of pictures, from her first attitude, of hanging on the mouth of Aeneas, through all the gradual excesses of her rage, to the concluding fatal act of desperation. But they are deeply imprinted on every on every schoolboy's memory. It need only be observed, that they are such, as almost necessarily spring up from the circumstances of her case, and which every reader, on first view, as agreeing to his own notices and observations, pronounces natural.

It may seem sufficient, therefore, to ascribe these pourtraitures of passion, so suitable to all our expectations, and in drawing which the

genius of the great poet so eminently excelled, to the original hand and design of Virgil. But the perverse humour of criticism, occasioned by this inveterate prejudice "of taking all resemblances for thefts," will allow no such thing. Before it will decide of this matter, every ancient writer, who but incidentally touches a love-adventure, must be sought out and brought in evidence against him. And finding that Homer hath his Calypso, and Euripides and Apollonius their Medea, it adjudges the entire episode to be stolen by piece-meal, and patched up out of their writings. I have a learned critic now before me, who roundly asserts," that, but for the Argonautics, there had been no fourth book "of the Aeneism," Some traits of resemblance there are. It could not be otherwise. all the use a candid reader, who comes to his author with the true spirit of a critic, will make of them, is to shew, "how justly the poet

But

copies nature, which had suggested similar "representations to his predecessors."

What is here concluded of the softer, cannot but hold more strongly of the boisterous

m JEREMIAS HOELSLINUS, Prolegom. ad. Apollon. Rhodium.

passions. These do not shelter, and conceal themselves within the man. It is particularly, of their nature, to stand forth, and shew themselves in outward actions. Of the more illustrious effects of the ruder passions the chief are contentions and wars-regum & populorum aestus; which, by reason of the grandeur of the subject, and its important consequences, so fitted to strike the thought, and fire the affections of the reader, poetry, I mean the highest and sublimest species of it, chuses principally to describe. In the conduct of such description, some difference will arise from the instruments in use for annoyance of the enemy, and, in general, the state of art military; but the actuating passions of rage, ambition, emulation, thirst of honour, revenge, &c. are invariably the same, and are constantly evidenced by the same external marks or characters. The shocks of armies, single combats; the chances and singularities of either; wounds, deaths, stratagems, and the other attendants on battle, which furnish out the state and magnificence of the epic muse, are, all of them, fixed, determinate objects; which leave their impressions on the mind of the poet, in as distinct and uniform characters, as the great constituent parts of the material universe itself. He hath only to look

abroad into life and action for the model of all such representations. On which account we can rarely be certain, that the picture is not from nature, though an exact resemblance give to superficial and unthinking observers the suspicion of art.

The same reasoning extends to all the phaenomena of human life, which are the effects or consequences of strong affections, and which set mankind before us in gestures, looks, or actions, declarative of the inward suggestions of the heart. It can seldom be affirmed with confidence, in such cases, on the score of any similarity, that one representation imitates another; since an ordinary attention to the same common original, sufficiently accounts for both. The reader, if he sees fit, will apply these remarks to the battles, games, travels, &c. of a great poet; the supposed sterility of whose genius hath been charged with serving itself pretty freely of the copious, inexhausted stores of Homer. In sum;

Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas,

Gaudia, &c.

Whatever be the actuating passion, it cannot but be thought unfair to suspect the artist of

imitation; where nothing more is pretended than a resemblance in the draught of similar effects, which it is not possible to avoid.

2. If this be comprehended, I shall need to say the less of the MANNERS; which are not less constant in their effects, than the PASSIONS. When the character of any person hath been signified, and his situation described, it is not wonderful, that twenty different writers should hit on the same attitudes, or employ him in the same manner. When Mercury is sent to command the departure of Ulysses from Calypso, our previous acquaintance with the hero's character makes us expect to find him in the precise attitude, given to him by the poet, "sitting in solitude on the sea-shore, and "casting a wishful eye towards Ithaca." Or, when, in the Iliad, an embassy is dispatched to treat with the resentful and vindictive, but brave Achilles, nothing could be more obvious than to draw the pupil of Chiron in his tent "soothing his angry soul with his harp, and "singing

"Th' immortal deeds of heroes and of kings."

It was the like attention to nature, which led Milton to dispose of his fallen angels after