{40}The Poet Monarch of all Human Sciences.
{41}In "Love's Labour's Lost"a resemblance has been fancied between this passage and Rosalind's deion of Biron,and the jest:-"Which his fair tongue--conceit's expositor -Delivers in such apt and gracious words,That aged ears play truant at his tables,And younger hearings are quite ravished,So sweet and voluble is his discourse."{42}Virgil's "AEneid,"Book xii.:-
"And shall this ground fainthearted dastard Turnus flying view?
Is it so vile a thing to die?"
(Phaer's Translation [1573].)
{43}Instances of the power of the Poet's work.
{44}Defectuous.This word,from the French "defectueux,"is used twice in the "Apologie for Poetrie."{45}Part II.The PARTS of Poetry.
{46}Can Pastoral be condemned?
{47}The close of Virgil's seventh Eclogue--Thyrsis was vanquished,and Corydon crowned with lasting glory.
{48}Or Elegiac?
{49}Or Iambic?or Satiric?
{50}From the first Satire of Persius,line 116,in a deion of Homer's satire:
"Omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico Tangit,et admissus circum praecordia ludit,"&c.
Shrewd Flaccus touches each vice in his laughing friend.Dryden thus translated the whole passage:-"Unlike in method,with concealed design Did crafty Horace his low numbers join;And,with a sly insinuating grace Laughed at his friend,and looked him in the face:
Would raise a blush where secret vice he found;And tickle,while he gently probed the wound;With seeming innocence the crowd beguiled,But made the desperate passes while he smiled."{51}From the end of the eleventh of Horace's epistles (Lib.1):
"Coelum non animum mutant,qui trans mare currunt,Strenua nos exercet inertia;navibus atque Quadrigis petimus bene vivere.Quod petis,hic est,Est Ulubris,animus si te non deficit aequus."They change their skies but not their mind who run across the seas;We toil in laboured idleness,and seek to live at ease With force of ships and four horse teams.That which you seek is here,At Ulubrae,unless your mind fail to be calm and clear.
"At Ulubrae"was equivalent to saying in the dullest corner of the world,or anywhere.Ulubrae was a little town probably in Campania,a Roman Little Pedlington.Thomas Carlyle may have had this passage in mind when he gave to the same thought a grander form in Sartor Resartus:"May we not say that the hour of spiritual enfranchisement is even this?When your ideal world,wherein the whole man has been dimly struggling and inexpressibly languishing to work,becomes revealed and thrown open,and you discover with amazement enough,like the Lothario in Wilhelm Meister,that your America is here or nowhere.The situation that has not its duty,its ideal,was never occupied by man.Yes,here,in this poor,miserable hampered actual wherein thou even now standest,here or nowhere,is thy Ideal:work it out therefrom,believe,live,and be free.Fool!the Ideal is in thyself,the impediment too is in thyself.Thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of.What matter whether such stuff be of this sort or that,so the form thou give it be heroic,be poetic?O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the actual,and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create,know this of a truth,the thing thou seekest is already with thee,here or nowhere,couldest thou only see."{52}Or Comic?
{53}In pistrinum.In the pounding-mill (usually worked by horses or asses).
{54}Or Tragic?
{55}The old song of Percy and Douglas,Chevy Chase in its first form.
{56}Or the Heroic?
{57}Epistles I.ii.4.Better than Chrysippus and Crantor.They were both philosophers,Chrysippus a subtle stoic,Crantor the first commentator upon Plato.
{58}Summary of the argument thus far.
{59}Objections stated and met.
{60}Cornelius Agrippa's book,"De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum et Artium,"was first published in 1532;Erasmus's "Moriae Encomium"was written in a week,in 1510,and went in a few months through seven editions.
{61}The objection to rhyme and metre.
{62}The first of these sentences is from Horace (Epistle I.xviii.
69):"Fly from the inquisitive man,for he is a babbler."The second,"While each pleases himself we are a credulous crowd,"seems to be varied from Ovid (Fasti,iv.311):-"Conscia mens recti famae mendacia risit:
Sed nos in vitium credula turba sumus."
A mind conscious of right laughs at the falsehoods of fame but towards vice we are a credulous crowd.
{63}The chief objections.
{64}That time might be better spent.
{65}Beg the question.
{66}That poetry is the mother of lies.
