more than a mercantile value upon what he sold, the trader, on his part, was necessarily cautious not to afford a price which his returns could not pay; so that while, in one point of view, the author sold at an inadequate price, the purchaser, in another, really got no more than value for his money.  That literature is ill recompensed, is usually rather the fault of the public than the bookseller, whose trade can only exist by buying that which can be sold to advantage.  The trader, who purchased the “Paradise Lost” for ten pounds, had probably no very good bargain.[15]

However fretted by these teasing and almost humiliating discussions, Dryden continued steadily advancing in his great labour; and about three years after it had been undertaken, the translation of Virgil, “the most noble and spirited,” said Pope, “which I know in any language,” was given to the public in July 1697.  So eager was the general expectation, that the first edition was exhausted in a few months, and a second published early in the next year.  “It satisfied,” says Johnson, “his friends, and, for the most part, silenced his enemies.”  But, although this was generally the case, there wanted not some to exercise the invidious task of criticism, or rather of malevolent detraction.  Among those, the highest name is that of Swift; the most distinguished for venomous and persevering malignity, that of Milbourne.

In his Epistle to Prince Posterity, prefixed to the “Tale of a Tub,” Swift, in the character of the dedicator, declares, “upon the word of a sincere man, that there is now actually in being a certain poet called John Dryden, whose translation of Virgil was lately printed in a large folio, well-bound, and, if diligent search were made, for aught I know, is yet to be seen.”  In his “Battle of the Books,” he tells us, “that Dryden, who encountered Virgil, soothed the good ancient by the endearing title of ‘father,’ and, by a large deduction of genealogies, made it appear, that they were nearly related, and humbly proposed an exchange of armour; as a mark of hospitality, Virgil consented, though his was of gold, and cost an hundred beeves, the other’s but of rusty iron.  However, this glittering armour became the modern still worse than his own.  Then they agreed to exchange horses; but, when it came to the trial, Dryden was afraid, and utterly unable to mount.”  A yet more bitter reproach is levelled by the wit against the poet, for his triple dedication of the Pastorals, Georgics, and Aeneid, to three several patrons, Clifford, Chesterfield, and Mulgrave.[16] But, though the recollection of the contemned Odes, like the spretae injuria formae of Juno, still continued to prompt these overflowings of Swift’s satire, he had too much taste and perception of poetry to attempt, gravely, to undermine, by a formal criticism, the merits of Dryden’s Virgil.