count of my poem; I must crave leave to tell you, that as I have
endeavoured to adorn it with noble thoughts, so much more to express
those thoughts with elocution. The composition of all poems is, or ought
to be, of wit; and wit in the poet, or wit-writing (if you will give me
leave to use a school-distinction) is no other than the faculty of
imagination in the writer, which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and
ranges through the field of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted
after: or, without metaphor, which searches over all the memory for the
species or ideas of those things which it designs to represent. Wit
written is that which is well designed, the happy result of thought, or
product of imagination. But to proceed from wit, in the general notion
of it, to the proper wit of an heroic or historical poem; I judge it
chiefly to consist in the delightful imaging of persons, actions,
passions, or things. It is not the jerk or sting of an epigram, nor the
seeming contradiction of a poor antithesis (the delight of an
ill-judging audience in a play of rhyme) nor the jingle of a more poor
Paronomasia; neither is it so much the morality of a grave sentence,
affected by Lucan, but more sparingly used by Virgil; but it is some
lively and apt description, dressed in such colours of speech, that it
sets before your eyes the absent object, as perfectly, and more
delightfully than nature. So then the first happiness of the poet's
imagination is properly invention or finding of the thought; the second
is fancy, or the variation, deriving or moulding of that thought, as the
judgment represents it proper to the subject; the third is elocution, or
the art of clothing and adorning that thought, so found and varied, in
apt, significant, and sounding words: the quickness of the imagination
is seen in the invention, the fertility in the fancy, and the accuracy
in the expression. For the two first of these, Ovid is famous among the
poets; for the latter, Virgil. Ovid images more often the movements and
affections of the mind, either combating between two contrary passions,
or extremely discomposed by one. His words therefore are the least part
of his care; for he pictures nature in disorder, with which the study
and choice of words is inconsistent. This is the proper wit of dialogue
or discourse, and consequently of the drama, where all that is said is
to be supposed the effect of sudden thought; which, though it excludes
not the