at the best.  Neither Virgil nor Homer were deficient in any of the former beauties; but in this last, which is expression, the Roman poet is at least equal to the Grecian, as I have said elsewhere; supplying the poverty of his language by his musical ear, and by his diligence.  But to return:  our two great poets, being so different in their tempers, one choleric and sanguine, the other phlegmatic and melancholic; that which makes them excel in their several ways is that each of them has follow’d his own natural inclination, as well in forming the design as in the execution of it.  The very heroes shew their authors:  Achilles is hot, impatient, revengeful, Impiger, iracundus, inexorabidis, acer[7] &c.; AEneas patient, considerate, careful of his people, and merciful to his enemies; ever submissive to the will of Heaven—­Quo fata trahunt retrahuntque seqitamur.[8] I could please myself with enlarging on this subject, but am forc’d to defer it to a fitter time.  From all I have said I will only draw this inference, that the action of Homer being more full of vigor than that of Virgil, according to the temper of the writer, is of consequence more pleasing to the reader.  One warms you by degrees:  the other sets you on fire all at once, and never intermits his heat.  ’Tis the same difference which Longinus makes betwixt the effects of eloquence in Demosthenes and Tully.  One persuades; the other commands.  You never cool while you read Homer, even not in the second book (a graceful flattery to his countrymen); but he hastens from the ships, and concludes not that book till he has made you an amends by the violent playing of a new machine.  From thence he hurries on his action with variety of events, and ends it in less compass than two months.  This vehemence of his, I confess, is more suitable to my temper; and therefore I have translated his first book with greater pleasure than any part of Virgil; but it was not a pleasure without pains.  The continual agitations of the spirits must needs be a weakening of any constitution, especially in age; and many pauses are required for refreshment betwixt the heats; the Iliad of itself being a third part longer than all Virgil’s works together.

This is what I thought needful in this place to say of Homer.  I proceed to Ovid and Chaucer, considering the former only in relation to the latter.  With Ovid ended the golden age of the Roman tongue; from Chaucer the purity of the English tongue began.  The manners of the poets were not unlike:  both of them were well bred, well natur’d, amorous, and libertine, at least in their writings, it may be also in their lives.  Their studies were the same, philosophy and philology.  Both of them were knowing in astronomy, of which Ovid’s books of the Roman feasts, and Chaucer’s treatise of the Astrolabe, are sufficient witnesses.  But Chaucer was likewise an astrologer, as were Virgil, Horace, Persius, and Manilius.  Both writ with wonderful facility and