perfect his numbers he considered these as they had a greater
mixture of vowels or consonants, and accordingly employed them as the
verse required either a greater smoothness or strength. What he most
affected was the Ionic, which has a peculiar sweetness, from its never
using contractions, and from its custom of resolving the diphthongs into
two syllables, so as to make the words open themselves with a more
spreading and sonorous fluency. With this he mingled the Attic
contractions, the broader Doric, and the feebler AEolic, which often
rejects its aspirate, or takes off its accent, and completed this variety
by altering some letters with the licence of poetry. Thus his measures,
instead of being fetters to his sense, were always in readiness to run
along with the warmth of his rapture, and even to give a further
representation of his notions, in the correspondence of their sounds to
what they signified. Out of all these he has derived that harmony which
makes us confess he had not only the richest head, but the finest ear in
the world. This is so great a truth, that whoever will but consult the
tune of his verses, even without understanding them (with the same sort of
diligence as we daily see practised in the case of Italian operas), will
find more sweetness, variety, and majesty of sound, than in any other
language of poetry. The beauty of his numbers is allowed by the critics to
be copied but faintly by Virgil himself, though they are so just as to
ascribe it to the nature of the Latin tongue: indeed the Greek has some
advantages both from the natural sound of its words, and the turn and
cadence of its verse, which agree with the genius of no other language.
Virgil was very sensible of this, and used the utmost diligence in working
up a more intractable language to whatsoever graces it was capable of,
and, in particular, never failed to bring the sound of his line to a
beautiful agreement with its sense. If the Grecian poet has not been so
frequently celebrated on this account as the Roman, the only reason is,
that fewer critics have understood one language than the other. Dionysius
of Halicarnassus has pointed out many of our author's beauties in this
kind, in his treatise of the Composition of Words. It suffices at present
to observe of his numbers, that they flow with so much ease, as to make
one imagine Homer had no other care than to transcribe as fast as the
Muses dictated, and, at the same time, with so much fo