Page:Virgil's Pastorals, Georgics and Aeneis - Dryden (1709) - volume 2.djvu/50

before Apollo for this Error. The God soon found that he was not able to defend his Favourite by Reason, for the Case was clear: he therefore gave this middle Sentence; That any thing might be allow'd to his Son Virgil, on the account of his other Merits; That being a Monarch he had a dispensing Power, and pardon'd him. But that this special Act of Grace might never be drawn into Example, or pleaded by his puny Successors, in justification of their ignorance; He decreed for the future, No Poet shou'd presume to make a Lady dye for Love two hundred years before her Birth. To Moralize this Story, Virgil is the Apollo, who has this Dispensing Power. His great Judgment made the Laws of Poetry, but he never made himself a Slave to them: Chronology at best is but a Cobweb-Law, and he broke through it with his weight. They who will imitate him wisely, must chuse, as he did, an obscure and a remote Æra, where they may invent at pleasure, and not be easily contradicted. Neither he, nor the Romans, had ever read the Bible, by which only his false Computation of Times can be made out against him: This Segrais says in his defence, and proves it from his Learned Friend Bochartus, whose Letter on this Subject, he has Printed at the end of the Fourth Æneid, to which I referr your Lordship and the Reader. Yet the Credit of Virgil was so great, that he made this Fable of his own Invention pass for an Authentick History, or at least as credible as any thing in Homer. Ovid takes it up after him, even in the same Age, and makes an ancient Heroine of Virgil's new created Dido; Dictates a Letter for her just before her death, to the ingrateful Fugitive; and very unluckily for himself, as for measuring a Sword with a Man so much superiour in force to him on the same Subject. I think I may be Judge of this, because I have Translated both. The Famous Author of the Art of Love