(Roem. Gesch.
II. 448, _seq_.)
[14] "I have taken some pains to make it my masterpiece in English."
Preface to Second Miscellany. Fox said that it "was better than the
original." J.C. Scaliger said of Erasmus: "Ex alieno ingenio poeta,
ex suo versificator."
[15] In one of the last letters he ever wrote, thanking his cousin
Mrs. Steward for a gift of marrow-puddings, he says: "A chine of
honest bacon would please my appetite more than all the
marrow-puddings; for I like them better plain, having a very vulgar
stomach." So of Cowley he says: "There was plenty enough, but ill
sorted, whole pyramids of sweetmeats for boys and women, but little
of solid meat for men." The physical is a truer antitype of the
spiritual man than we are willing to admit, and the brain is often
forced to acknowledge the inconvenient country-cousinship of the
stomach.
[16] In his preface to "All for Love," he says, evidently alluding to
himself: "If he have a friend whose hastiness in writing is his
greatest fault, Horace would have taught him to have minced the
matter, and to have called it readiness of thought and a flowing
fancy." And in the Preface to the Fables he says of Homer: "This
vehemence of his, I confess, is more suitable to my temper.
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