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MY DEAR FRIEND: I consider you now as at the court of Augustus, where, if
ever the desire of pleasing animated you, it must make you exert all the
means of doing it. You will see there, full as well, I dare say, as
Horace did at Rome, how states are defended by arms, adorned by manners,
and improved by laws. Nay, you have an Horace there as well as an
Augustus; I need not name Voltaire, 'qui nil molitur inept?' as Horace
himself said of another poet. I have lately read over all his works that
are published, though I had read them more than once before. I was
induced to this by his 'Siecle de Louis XIV', which I have yet read but
four times. In reading over all his works, with more attention I suppose
than before, my former admiration of him is, I own, turned into
astonishment. There is no one kind of writing in which he has not
excelled. You are so severe a classic that I question whether you will
allow me to call his 'Henriade' an epic poem, for want of the proper
number of gods, devils, witches and other absurdities, requisite for the
machinery; which machinery is, it seems, necessary to constitute the
'epopee'. But whether you do or not, I will declare (though possibly to
my own shame) that I never read any epic poem with near so much pleasure.
I am grown old, and have possibly lost a great deal of that fire which
formerly made me love fire in others at any rate, and however attended
with smoke; but now I must have all sense, and cannot, for the sake of
five righteous lines, forgive a thousand absurd ones.

In this disposition of mind, judge whether I can read all Homer through
'tout de suite'. I admire its beauties; but, to tell you the truth, when
he slumbers, I sleep. Virgil, I confess, is all sense, and therefore I
like him better than his model; but he is often languid, especially in
his five or six last books, during which I am obliged to take a good deal
of snuff. Besides, I profess myself an ally of Turnus against the pious
AEneas, who, like many 'soi-disant' pious people, does the most flagrant
injustice and violence in order to execute what they impudently call the
will of Heaven. But what will you say, when I tell you truly, that I
cannot possibly read our countryman Milton through? I acknowledge him to
have some most sublime passages, some prodigious flashes of light; but
then you must acknowledge that light is often followed by darkness
visible, to use his own expression. Besides, not having the hono