quickness of wit in repartees, yet admits not a too curious
election of words, too frequent allusions, or use of tropes, or, in
fine, anything that shows remoteness of thought or labour in the writer.
On the other side, Virgil speaks not so often to us in the person of
another, like Ovid, but in his own: he relates almost all things as from
himself, and thereby gains more liberty than the other, to express his
thoughts with all the graces of elocution, to write more figuratively,
and to confess as well the labour as the force of his imagination.
Though he describes his Dido well and naturally, in the violence of her
passions, yet he must yield in that to the Myrrha, the Biblis, the
Althaea, of Ovid; for as great an admirer of him as I am, I must
acknowledge, that if I see not more of their souls than I see of Dido's,
at least I have a greater concernment for them: and that convinces me
that Ovid has touched those tender strokes more delicately than Virgil
could. But when action or persons are to be described, when any such
image is to be set before us, how bold, how masterly are the strokes of
Virgil! We see the objects he presents us with in their native figures,
in their proper motions; but so we see them, as our own eyes could never
have beheld them so beautiful in themselves. We see the soul of the
poet, like that universal one of which he speaks, informing and moving
through all his pictures:

--Totamque infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem, et magno so corpore miscet.

We behold him embellishing his images, as he makes Venus breathing
beauty upon her son AEneas.

--lumenque juventae
Purpureum, et laetos oculis afflarat honores:
Quale manus addunt ebori decus, aut ubi flavo
Argentum Pariusve lapis circundatur auro.

See his Tempest, his Funeral Sports, his Combat of Turnus and AEneas: and
in his Georgics, which I esteem the divinest part of all his writings,
the Plague, the Country, the Battle of the Bulls, the Labour of the
Bees, and those many other excellent images of nature, most of which are
neither great in themselves, nor have any natural ornament to bear them
up: but the words wherewith he describes them are so excellent that it
might be well applied to him, which was said by Ovid, _Materiam
superabat opus_: the very sound of his words has often somewhat that is
connatural to the subject; and while we read him, we sit, as in a play,
beholding the scenes of what he represents. To perform