those parts which others are to sustain in a poem. This he has said, not distinguishing rightly between our natural dispositions and accidental offices. And this he has said again, not minding, that though it be taken from another book, it is still from the same author. However, vanity loves to gratify itself by the repetition of what it esteems to be written with spirit, and even when we repeat it ourselves, provided another hears us. Hence has he been followed by a magisterial set of men, who quote themselves, and swell their new performances with what they admire in their former treatises. This is a most extraordinary knack of arguing, whereby a man can never want a proof, if he be allowed to become an authority for his own opinion.
P. 52. v. 15. And no kind billow.]How impertinent is this case of pity, says Zoilus, to bemoan, that the prince was not tossed towards land: it is enough he lost his life, and there is an end of his suffering where there is an end of his feeling. To carry the matter farther is just the same foolish management as Homer has shown in his Iliads, which he spins out into forty trifles beyond the death of Hector. But the critic must allow me to put the readers in mind, that death was not the last distress the ancients believed was to be met upon earth. The last was the remaining unburied, which had this misery annexed, that while the body was without its funeral rites in this world, the soul was supposed
