LETTER CLXXX

Bath, October 4, 1752

My dear friend:  I consider you now as at the court of Augustus, where, if ever the desire of pleasing animated you, it must make you exert all the means of doing it.  You will see there, full as well, I dare say, as Horace did at Rome, how states are defended by arms, adorned by manners, and improved by laws.  Nay, you have an Horace there as well as an Augustus; I need not name Voltaire, ‘qui nil molitur inept?’ as Horace himself said of another poet.  I have lately read over all his works that are published, though I had read them more than once before.  I was induced to this by his ‘Siecle de Louis XIV’, which I have yet read but four times.  In reading over all his works, with more attention I suppose than before, my former admiration of him is, I own, turned into astonishment.  There is no one kind of writing in which he has not excelled.  You are so severe a classic that I question whether you will allow me to call his ‘Henriade’ an epic poem, for want of the proper number of gods, devils, witches and other absurdities, requisite for the machinery; which machinery is, it seems, necessary to constitute the ‘epopee’.  But whether you do or not, I will declare (though possibly to my own shame) that I never read any epic poem with near so much pleasure.  I am grown old, and have possibly lost a great deal of that fire which formerly made me love fire in others at any rate, and however attended with smoke; but now I must have all sense, and cannot, for the sake of five righteous lines, forgive a thousand absurd ones.

In this disposition of mind, judge whether I can read all Homer through ‘tout de suite’.  I admire its beauties; but, to tell you the truth, when he slumbers, I sleep.  Virgil, I confess, is all sense, and therefore I like him better than his model; but he is often languid, especially in his five or six last books, during which I am obliged to take a good deal of snuff.  Besides, I profess myself an ally of Turnus against the pious AEneas, who, like many ‘soi-disant’ pious people, does the most flagrant injustice and violence in order to execute what they impudently call the will of Heaven.  But what will you say, when I tell you truly, that I cannot possibly read our countryman Milton through?  I acknowledge him to have some most sublime passages, some prodigious flashes of light; but then you must acknowledge that light is often followed by darkness visible, to use his own expression.  Besides, not having the honor to be acquainted with any of the parties in this poem, except the Man and the Woman, the characters and speeches of a dozen or two of angels and of as many devils, are as much above my reach as my entertainment.  Keep this secret for me:  for if it should be known, I should be abused by every tasteless pedant, and every solid divine in England.