een preserved in the devastation of cities,
and snatched up from the wreck of nations; which those who fled before
barbarians have been careful to carry off in the hurry of migration, and
of which barbarians have repented the destruction. If in books thus made
venerable by the uniform attestation of successive ages, any passages
shall appear unworthy of that praise which they have formerly received,
let us not immediately determine, that they owed their reputation to
dulness or bigotry; but suspect at least that our ancestors had some
reasons for their opinions, and that our ignorance of those reasons
makes us differ from them.

It often happens that an author's reputation is endangered in succeeding
times, by that which raised the loudest applause among his
contemporaries: nothing is read with greater pleasure than allusions to
recent facts, reigning opinions, or present controversies; but when
facts are forgotten, and controversies extinguished, these favourite
touches lose all their graces; and the author in his descent to
posterity must be left to the mercy of chance, without any power of
ascertaining the memory of those things, to which he owed his luckiest
thoughts and his kindest reception.

On such occasions, every reader should remember the diffidence of
Socrates, and repair by his candour the injuries of time: he should
impute the seeming defects of his author to some chasm of intelligence,
and suppose that the sense which is now weak was once forcible, and the
expression which is now dubious formerly determinate.

How much the mutilation of ancient history has taken away from the
beauty of poetical performances, may be conjectured from the light which
a lucky commentator sometimes effuses, by the recovery of an incident
that had been long forgotten: thus, in the third book of Horace, Juno's
denunciations against, those that should presume to raise again the
walls of Troy, could for many ages please only by splendid images and
swelling language, of which no man discovered the use or propriety, till
Le Fevre, by showing on what occasion the Ode was written, changed
wonder to rational delight. Many passages yet undoubtedly remain in the
same author, which an exacter knowledge of the incidents of his time
would clear from objections. Among these I have always numbered the
following lines:

_Aurum per medios ire satellites,
Et perrumpere amat saxa, potentius
Ictu fulmineo. Concidit auguris
Argi