e
general increase of good taste, and the improvement of education. All
these contributed to the encouragement of Dryden's great undertaking,
which promised to rescue Virgil from the degraded version of Ogilby, and
present him in a becoming form to a public, now prepared to receive him
with merited admiration.

While our author was labouring in this great work, and the public were
waiting the issue with impatience and attention, a feud, of which it is
now impossible to trace the cause, arose between the bard and his
publisher. Their union before seems to have been of a nature more
friendly than interest alone could have begotten; for Dryden, in one
letter, talks with gratitude of Tonson's affording him his company down
to Northamptonshire; and this friendly intimacy Jacob neglected not to
cultivate, by those occasional compliments of fruit and wine, which are
often acknowledged in the course of their correspondence. But a quarrel
broke out between them, when the translation of Virgil had advanced so
far as the completion of the seventh Aeneid; at which period Dryden
charges Tonson bitterly, with an intention, from the very beginning, to
deprive him of all profit by the second subscriptions; alluding, I
presume, to the price which the bookseller charged him upon the volumes
delivered to the subscribers. The bibliopolist seems to have bent before
the storm, and pacified the incensed bard, by verbal submission, though
probably without relaxing his exactions and drawbacks in any material
degree. Another cause of this dissension appears to have been the Notes
upon "Virgil," for which Tonson would allow no additional emolument to
the author, although Dryden says, "that to make them good, would cost
six months' labour at least," and elsewhere tells Tonson ironically,
that, since not to be paid, they shall be short, "for the saving of the
paper." I cannot think that we have sustained any great loss by Tonson's
penurious economy on this occasion. In his prefaces and dedications,
Dryden let his own ideas freely forth to the public; but in his Notes
upon the Classics, witness those on "Juvenal" and "Persius," he neither
indulged in critical dissertations on particular beauties and defects,
nor in general remarks upon the kind of poetry before him; but contented
himself with rendering into English the antiquarian dissertations of
Dacier and other foreign commentators, with now and then an explanatory
paraphrase of an obscure passag