by the pomp of machinery. Where truth is sufficient to fill the
mind, fiction is worse than useless; the counterfeit debases the
genuine. His account of Milton's blindness, if we suppose it caused by
study in the formation of his poem, a supposition surely allowable, is
poetically true, and happily imagined. But the car of Dryden, with his
_two coursers_, has nothing in it peculiar; it is a car in which any
other rider may be placed.

The Bard appears, at the first view, to be, as Algarotti and others have
remarked, an imitation of the prophecy of Nereus. Algarotti thinks it
superiour to its original; and, if preference depends only on the
imagery and animation of the two poems, his judgment is right. There is
in the Bard more force, more thought, and more variety. But to copy is
less than to invent, and the copy has been unhappily produced at a wrong
time. The fiction of Horace was to the Romans credible; but its revival
disgusts us with apparent and unconquerable falsehood. Incredulus odi.

To select a singular event, and swell it to a giant's bulk by fabulous
appendages of spectres and predictions, has little difficulty; for he
that forsakes the probable may always find the marvellous. And it has
little use; we are affected only as we believe; we are improved only as
we find something to be imitated or declined. I do not see that the Bard
promotes any truth, moral or political. His stanzas are too long,
especially his epodes; the ode is finished before the ear has learned
its measures, and, consequently, before it can receive pleasure from
their consonance and recurrence.

Of the first stanza, the abrupt beginning has been celebrated; but
technical beauties can give praise only to the inventor. It is in the
power of any man to rush abruptly upon his subject, that has read the
ballad of Johnny Armstrong:

Is there ever a man in all Scotland.

The initial resemblances, or alliterations, "ruin, ruthless, helm or
hauberk," are below the grandeur of a poem that endeavours at sublimity.

In the second stanza, the Bard is well described; but in the third we
have the puerilities of obsolete mythology. When we are told that
"Cadwallo hush'd the stormy main," and that "Modred made huge Plinlimmon
bow his cloud-topp'd head," attention recoils from the repetition of a
tale that, even when it was first heard, was heard with scorn.

The _weaving_ of the _winding sheet_ he borrowed, as he owns, from the
Northern Bards; b