By choice or fate, these lonely shores to tread, No greater wonders east or west can boast Than yon small island on the pleasing coast. If e’er thy sight would blissful scenes explore, The current pass, and seek the further shore.” Ever since the time of Pope there has been a glut of lines of this sort, and we are now as little disposed to admire a man for being able to write them, as for being able to write his name. But in the days of William the Third such versification was rare; and a rhymer who had any skill in it passed for a great poet, just as in the dark ages a person who could write his name passed for a great clerk. Accordingly, Duke, Stepney, Granville, Walsh, and others, whose only title to fame was that they said in tolerable metre what might have been as well said in prose, or what was not worth saying {335}at all, were honoured with marks of distinction which ought to be reserved for genius. With these Addison must have ranked, if he had not earned true and lasting glory by performances which very little resembled his juvenile poems. Dryden was now busied with Virgil, and obtained from Addison a critical preface to the Georgies. In return for this service, and for other services of the same kind, the veteran poet, in the postscript to the translation of the Æneid, complimented his young friend with great liberality, and indeed with more liberality than sincerity. He affected to be afraid that his own performance would not sustain a comparison with the version of the fourth Georgie, by “the most ingenious Mr. Addison of Oxford.” “After his bees,” added Dryden, “my latter swarm is scarcely worth the hiving.”