to hatch it, or, in more
intelligible language, to translate it into English, did not I find the
interpretation of it very difficult; for the author seems to have been
more intent upon the figure of his poem than upon the sense of it.

The pair of wings consists of twelve verses, or rather feathers, every
verse decreasing gradually in its measure according to its situation in
the wing. The subject of it, as in the rest of the poems which follow,
bears some remote affinity with the figure, for it describes a god of
love, who is always painted with wings.

The axe, methinks, would have been a good figure for a lampoon, had the
edge of it consisted of the most satirical parts of the work; but as it
is in the original, I take it to have been nothing else but the poesy of
an axe which was consecrated to Minerva, and was thought to be the same
that Epeus made use of in the building of the Trojan horse; which is a
hint I shall leave to the consideration of the critics. I am apt to
think that the poesy was written originally upon the axe, like those
which our modern cutlers inscribe upon their knives; and that, therefore,
the poesy still remains in its ancient shape, though the axe itself is
lost.

The shepherd's pipe may be said to be full of music, for it is composed
of nine different kinds of verses, which by their several lengths
resemble the nine stops of the old musical instrument, that is likewise
the subject of the poem.

The altar is inscribed with the epitaph of Troilus the son of Hecuba;
which, by the way, makes me believe that these false pieces of wit are
much more ancient than the authors to whom they are generally ascribed;
at least, I will never be persuaded that so fine a writer as Theocritus
could have been the author of any such simple works.

It was impossible for a man to succeed in these performances who was not
a kind of painter, or at least a designer. He was first of all to draw
the outline of the subject which he intended to write upon, and
afterwards conform the description to the figure of his subject. The
poetry was to contract or dilate itself according to the mould in which
it was cast. In a word, the verses were to be cramped or extended to the
dimensions of the frame that was prepared for them; and to undergo the
fate of those persons whom the tyrant Procrustes used to lodge in his
iron bed: if they were too short, he stretched them on a rack; and if
they were too long, chopped off a p