Apicius.—­I wish, Mercury, you had taught me your art of cookery in my lifetime; but it is a sad thing not to know what good living is till after one is dead.

DIALOGUE XX.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT—­CHARLES XII., KING OF SWEDEN.

Alexander.—­Your Majesty seems in great wrath!  Who has offended you?

Charles.—­The offence is to you as much as me.  Here is a fellow admitted into Elysium who has affronted us both—­an English poet, one Pope.  He has called us two madmen!

Alexander.—­I have been unlucky in poets.  No prince ever was fonder of the Muses than I, or has received from them a more ungrateful return.  When I was alive, I declared that I envied Achilles because he had a Homer to celebrate his exploits; and I most bountifully rewarded Choerilus, a pretender to poetry, for writing verses on mine.  But my liberality, instead of doing me honour, has since drawn upon me the ridicule of Horace, a witty Roman poet; and Lucan, another versifier of the same nation, has loaded my memory with the harshest invectives.

Charles.—­I know nothing of these; but I know that in my time a pert French satirist, one Boileau, made so free with your character, that I tore his book for having abused my favourite hero.  And now this saucy Englishman has libelled us both.  But I have a proposal to make to you for the reparation of our honour.  If you will join with me, we will turn all these insolent scribblers out of Elysium, and throw them down headlong to the bottom of Tartarus, in spite of Pluto and all his guards.

Alexander.—­This is just such a scheme as that you formed at Bender, to maintain yourself there, with the aid of three hundred Swedes, against the whole force of the Ottoman Empire.  And I must say that such follies gave the English poet too much cause to call you a madman.

Charles.—­If my heroism was madness, yours, I presume, was not wisdom.

Alexander.—­There was a vast difference between your conduct and mine.  Let poets or declaimers say what they will, history shows that I was not only the bravest soldier, but one of the ablest commanders the world has ever seen.  Whereas you, by imprudently leading your army into vast and barren deserts at the approach of the winter, exposed it to perish in its march for want of subsistence, lost your artillery, lost a great number of your soldiers, and was forced to fight with the Muscovites under such disadvantages as made it almost impossible for you to conquer.

Charles.—­I will not dispute your superiority as a general.  It is not for me, a mere mortal, to contend with the son of Jupiter Ammon.