the crane whirls aloft at one time a stone, at another a great piece of timber:  the dismal funerals dispute the way with the unwieldy carriages:  here runs a mad dog, there rushes a sow begrimed with mire.  Go now, and meditate with yourself your harmonious verses.  All the whole choir of poets love the grove, and avoid cities, due votaries to Bacchus delighting in repose and shade.  Would you have me, amid so great noise both by night and day, [attempt] to sing, and trace the difficult footsteps of the poets?  A genius who has chosen quiet Athens for his residence, and has devoted seven years to study, and has grown old in books and study, frequently walks forth more dumb than a statue, and shakes the people’s sides with laughter:  here, in the midst of the billows and tempests of the city, can I be thought capable of connecting words likely to wake the sound of the lyre?

At Rome there was a rhetorician, brother to a lawyer:  [so fond of each other were they,] that they would hear nothing but the mere praises of each other:  insomuch, that the latter appeared a Gracchus to the former, the former a Mucius to the latter.  Why should this frenzy affect the obstreperous poets in a less degree?  I write odes, another elegies:  a work wonderful to behold, and burnished by the nine muses!  Observe first, with what a fastidious air, with what importance we survey the temple [of Apollo] vacant for the Roman poets.  In the next place you may follow (if you are at leisure) and hear what each produces, and wherefore each weaves for himself the crown.  Like Samnite gladiators in slow duel, till candle-light, we are beaten and waste out the enemy with equal blows:  I came off Alcaeus, in his suffrage; he is mine, who?  Why who but Callimachus?  Or, if he seems to make a greater demand, he becomes Mimnermus, and grows in fame by the chosen appellation.  Much do I endure in order to pacify this passionate race of poets, when I am writing; and submissive court the applause of the people; [but,] having finished my studies and recovered my senses, I the same man can now boldly stop my open ears against reciters.

Those who make bad verses are laughed at:  but they are pleased in writing, and reverence themselves; and if you are silent, they, happy, fall to praising of their own accord whatever they have written.  But he who desires to execute a genuine poem, will with his papers assume the spirit of an honest critic:  whatever words shall have but little clearness and elegance, or shall be without weight and held unworthy of estimation, he will dare to displace:  though they may recede with reluctance, and still remain in the sanctuary of Vesta:  those that have been long hidden from the people he kindly will drag forth, and bring to light those expressive denominations of things that were used by the Catos and Cethegi of ancient times, though now deformed dust and neglected age presses upon them:  he will adopt new words, which use, the parent [of language], shall produce: