easy to enlarge upon a good hint, that I do not question but my ingenious
readers will apply what I have said to many other particulars; and that
we shall see the town filled in a very little time with poetical tippets,
handkerchiefs, snuff-boxes, and the like female ornaments. I shall
therefore conclude with a word of advice to those admirable English
authors who call themselves Pindaric writers, that they would apply
themselves to this kind of wit without loss of time, as being provided
better than any other poets with verses of all sizes and dimensions.

Second Paper.

_Operose nihil aguat_.

SENECA.

Busy about nothing.

There is nothing more certain than that every man would be a wit if he
could; and notwithstanding pedants of pretended depth and solidity are
apt to decry the writings of a polite author, as flash and froth, they
all of them show, upon occasion, that they would spare no pains to arrive
at the character of those whom they seem to despise. For this reason we
often find them endeavouring at works of fancy, which cost them infinite
pangs in the production. The truth of it is, a man had better be a
galley-slave than a wit, were one to gain that title by those elaborate
trifles which have been the inventions of such authors as were often
masters of great learning, but no genius.

In my last paper I mentioned some of these false wits among the ancients;
and in this shall give the reader two or three other species of them,
that flourished in the same early ages of the world. The first I shall
produce are the lipogrammatists or letter-droppers of antiquity, that
would take an exception, without any reason, against some particular
letter in the alphabet, so as not to admit it once into a whole poem. One
Tryphiodorus was a great master in this kind of writing. He composed an
"Odyssey" or epic poem on the adventures of Ulysses, consisting of four-
and-twenty books, having entirely banished the letter A from his first
book, which was called Alpha, as _lucus a non lucendo_, because there was
not an Alpha in it. His second book was inscribed Beta for the same
reason. In short, the poet excluded the whole four-and-twenty letters in
their turns, and showed them, one after another, that he could do his
business without them.

It must have been very pleasant to have seen this poet avoiding the
reprobate letter, as much as another would a false quantity, and making
his escape from it thr