than the violence of their passions
would admit." Passion is sometimes highly eloquent; feeling strongly it
expresses itself forcibly, and Dryden meant that the characters in Ovid,
by their numerous strokes of studied brilliancy, seemed to be carried
away less by their emotions than by the ambition to shine. These
glittering artifices were formerly called wit, and Dryden complains that
Ovid "is frequently witty out of season," but they are not wit in our
present sense of the word. Occasionally they are the far-fetched or
affected prettinesses which are properly called conceits; and more
commonly they consist in terse antithesis, and a sparkle of words
produced by the balanced repetition of a phrase. They are often as
appropriate as they are showy, and if they are among the blemishes they
are conspicuous among the beauties of Ovid. His writings are marked by
opposite qualities. He is sometimes too artificial in his expression of
the passions, and sometimes he is natural, glowing, and pathetic. He
abounds in pointed sentences, and is not less distinguished for the
easy, spontaneous flow of his language. He is at once prolix and
concise, indulging in a single vein of thought till the monotony becomes
tedious, and yet enunciating his ideas with sententious brevity. The
condensation of the Latin in many places cannot be preserved in the
diffuser idioms of our English tongue, but, if we overlook a few weak
couplets, Pope has translated the Epistle of Sappho to Phaon with rare
felicity, and notwithstanding the inevitable loss of some happy turns of
expression, he has managed to retain both the passion and the poetry.
Effusions of sentiment were better adapted to his genius than the heroic
narrative of the Thebais; and his limpid measure, which neither
resembled the numerous and robuster verse of Statius, nor was suited to
an epic theme, accorded with the sweetness and uniformity of Ovid's
verse, and with the outpourings of grief and tenderness which are the
staple of these epistolary strains. There is no ground for the regret of
Warton that Pope should have spent a little time in translating portions
of Ovid and Statius. It would be as reasonable to lament that he stooped
to the preliminary discipline which made him a poet. He has related that
he did not take to translation till he found himself unequal to original
composition, and, like all who excel in any department, he learnt, by
copying his predecessors, to rival them.