of thought or labour in the writer.  On the other side, Virgil speaks not so often to us in the person of another, like Ovid, but in his own:  he relates almost all things as from himself, and thereby gains more liberty than the other, to express his thoughts with all the graces of elocution, to write more figuratively, and to confess as well the labour as the force of his imagination.  Though he describes his Dido well and naturally, in the violence of her passions, yet he must yield in that to the Myrrha, the Biblis, the Althaea, of Ovid; for as great an admirer of him as I am, I must acknowledge, that if I see not more of their souls than I see of Dido’s, at least I have a greater concernment for them:  and that convinces me that Ovid has touched those tender strokes more delicately than Virgil could.  But when action or persons are to be described, when any such image is to be set before us, how bold, how masterly are the strokes of Virgil!  We see the objects he presents us with in their native figures, in their proper motions; but so we see them, as our own eyes could never have beheld them so beautiful in themselves.  We see the soul of the poet, like that universal one of which he speaks, informing and moving through all his pictures: 

   —­Totamque infusa per artus
  Mens agitat molem, et magno so corpore miscet.

We behold him embellishing his images, as he makes Venus breathing beauty upon her son AEneas.

    —­lumenque juventae
  Purpureum, et laetos oculis afflarat honores: 
  Quale manus addunt ebori decus, aut ubi flavo
  Argentum Pariusve lapis circundatur auro.

See his Tempest, his Funeral Sports, his Combat of Turnus and AEneas:  and in his Georgics, which I esteem the divinest part of all his writings, the Plague, the Country, the Battle of the Bulls, the Labour of the Bees, and those many other excellent images of nature, most of which are neither great in themselves, nor have any natural ornament to bear them up:  but the words wherewith he describes them are so excellent that it might be well applied to him, which was said by Ovid, Materiam superabat opus:  the very sound of his words has often somewhat that is connatural to the subject; and while we read him, we sit, as in a play, beholding the scenes of what he represents.  To perform this, he made frequent use of tropes, which you know change the nature of a known word, by applying it to some other signification; and this is it which Horace means in his epistle to the Pisos: 

  Dixeris egregie, notum si callida verbum
  Reddiderit junctura novum—­