The Works of Virgil Volume 2 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ' 0 THE Mfi'is. Ixxxiil mastery in the language is required; the poet must have a magazine of words, and have the art to manage his few vowels to the best advantage, thjit they may go the farther. He must also know the nature of the vowels ? which are more sonorous, and which more soft and sweet? and so dispose them as his present occasions require: all which, and a thousand secrets of versification beside, he may learn from Virgil, -if he will take him for his guide. If he be abovj Virgil, and is resolved to follow his Owh -verfa (as the French call it), the proverb will fall heavily upon him: " Who teaches, himself, has a fool for his master." Virgil employed eleven years .upon his yet he left it, as he thought himself, imperfect; which when I seriously consider, I wish, that, instead of three years which. I have spent in the translation of his works, I had four years more allowed me to correct my errors, that I might make my version somewhat more tolerable than it Js: for a poet cannot have too great a reverence for his readers, if he expects his labours should survive him. Yet I will neither plead my age nor sickness, in excuse of the faults which I have made: that I wanted time, is all that I have to say; for some of my subscribers grew so clamorous, that I could no longer defer the publication. I hope, from the candour of your lordship, and your often experienced goodness to me, that, if the faults are not too many, you will make allowances with Horace: -si plura nitent in carmine, non egopaucii Offendar maculis, quas aut incuriafudit, ' Aut hwnana parum cavit natura. You may please also to observe, that there is" not, to the best of my remembrance, one vowel gaping on another for want of a caesura, in this whole poem: but, where a vowel ends a word, the ne...