Essays, Moral and Literary (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: No. LXI. On Politian and Muretus, two elegant Writers of Modern Latin. One of the brightest luminaries, which shone forth at the revival of learning, was Politian. A slight knowledge of the Greek was in his age a great and rare attainment. He not only understood the language so as to read it, but to compose in it. As a grammarian, as an orator, as a poet, he has been an object of general admiration. Genius he undoubtedly possessed in a degree superior to the laborious scholars of his times; but his poetry is notwithstanding greatly defective. In fire he abounds; but he is wanting in judgment and in art. There are many fine lines in his Rusticus, and the diction is throughout remarkably splendid, though not always purely classical. The Latin poets of this period were not, indeed, so careful of the classical purity of their style as of harmony and brilliancy. Several of the poems of Politian are florid to excess, and far beyond that boundary which Augustan taste delineates. When we consider the state of literature at this early season, we must allow that great applause, which has been paid to such writers as Politian, justly due. They were under the necessity of breaking through a thick cloud of ignorance, and they had to contend with the rude taste of their age before their writings could gain attention. Under every difficulty, they arrived, by the extraordinary efforts of emulation and genius, to a degree of excellence, which greatly resembled that of the models which they selected for imitation. The Greek verses, which he wrote at a very early age, are highly commended. He prefixed the age at which he wrote them. Scaliger says he should not have done this; for they are so excellent, that even his Latin verses, which he wrote when a man, are by no means equal to them. ...