My space will not afford many extracts, but I cannot
forbear one or two. He says of Chaucer, that "he is a perpetual fountain
of good sense,"[84] and likes him better than Ovid,--a bold confession in
that day. He prefers the pastorals of Theocritus to those of Virgil.
"Virgil's shepherds are too well read in the philosophy of Epicurus and
of Plato"; "there is a kind of rusticity in all those pompous verses,
somewhat of a holiday shepherd strutting in his country buskins";[85]
"Theocritus is softer than Ovid, he touches the passions more delicately,
and performs all this out of his own fund, without diving into the arts
and sciences for a supply. Even his Doric dialect has an incomparable
sweetness in his clownishness, like a fair shepherdess, in her country
russet, talking in a Yorkshire tone."[86] Comparing Virgil's verse with
that of some other poets, he says, that his "numbers are perpetually
varied to increase the delight of the reader, so that the same sounds are
never repeated twice together. On the contrary, Ovid and Claudian, though
they write in styles different from each other, yet have each of them but
one sort of music in their verses. All the versification and little
variety of Claudian is included within the compass of four or five lines,
and then he begins again in the same tenor, perpetually closing his sense
at the end of a verse, and that verse commonly which they call golden, or
two substantives and two adjectives with a verb betwixt them to keep the
peace.
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