g the advances of later
ages in science, and the assistance which the infusion of so many new
ideas has given us, we fall below the ancients in the art of
composition. Some part of their superiority may be justly ascribed to
the graces of their language, from which the most polished of the
present European tongues are nothing more than barbarous degenerations.
Some advantage they might gain merely by priority, which put them in
possession of the most natural sentiments, and left us nothing but
servile repetition or forced conceits. But the greater part of their
praise seems to have been the just reward of modesty and labour. Their
sense of human weakness confined them commonly to one study, which their
knowledge of the extent of every science engaged them to prosecute with
indefatigable diligence.

Among the writers of antiquity I remember none except Statius who
ventures to mention the speedy production of his writings, either as an
extenuation of his faults, or a proof of his facility. Nor did Statius,
when he considered himself as a candidate for lasting reputation, think
a closer attention unnecessary, but amidst all his pride and indigence,
the two great hasteners of modern poems, employed twelve years upon the
Thebaid, and thinks his claim to renown proportionate to his labour.

_Thebais, multa cruciata lima,
Tentat, audaci fide, Mantuanae
Gaudia famae_.

Polish'd with endless toil, my lays
At length aspire to Mantuan praise.

Ovid indeed apologizes in his banishment for the imperfection of his
letters, but mentions his want of leisure to polish them as an addition
to his calamities; and was so far from imagining revisals and
corrections unnecessary, that at his departure from Rome, he threw his
Metamorphoses into the fire, lest he should be disgraced by a book which
he could not hope to finish.

It seems not often to have happened that the same writer aspired to
reputation in verse and prose; and of those few that attempted such
diversity of excellence, I know not that even one succeeded. Contrary
characters they never imagined a single mind able to support, and
therefore no man is recorded to have undertaken more than one kind of
dramatick poetry.

What they had written, they did not venture in their first fondness to
thrust into the world, but, considering the impropriety of sending forth
inconsiderately that which cannot be recalled, deferred the publication,
if not nine years, according t