elegance, but for sound—to perform which a mastery in the language is required; the poet must have a magazine of words, and have the art to manage his few vowels to the best advantage, that they may go the farther. He must also know the nature of the vowels—which are more sonorous, and which more soft and sweet—and so dispose them as his present occasions require; all which, and a thousand secrets of versification beside, he may learn from Virgil, if he will take him for his guide. If he be above Virgil, and is resolved to follow his own _verve_ (as the French call it), the proverb will fall heavily upon him: “Who teaches himself has a fool for his master.” Virgil employed eleven years upon his “Æneis,” yet he left it, as he thought himself, imperfect; which, when I seriously consider, I wish that, instead of three years which I have spent in the translation of his works, I had four years more allowed me to correct my errors, that I might make my version somewhat more tolerable than it is; for a poet cannot have too great a reverence for his readers if he expects his labours should survive him. Yet I will neither plead my age nor sickness in excuse of the faults which I have made. That I wanted time is all I have to say; for some of my subscribers grew so clamorous that I could no longer defer the publication. I hope, from the candour of your lordship, and your often-experienced goodness to me, that if the faults are not too many you will make allowances, with Horace:— “_Si plura nitent in carmine_, _non ego paucis_ _Offendar maculis_, _quas aut incuria fudit_, _Aut humana parùm cavit natura_.” You may please also to observe that there is not, to the best of my remembrance, one vowel gaping on another for want of a cæsura in this whole poem. But where a vowel ends a word the next begins either with a consonant or what is its equivalent; for our _w_ and _h_ aspirate, and our diphthongs, are plainly such. The greatest latitude I take is in the letter _y_ when it concludes a word and the first syllable of the next begins with a vowel. Neither need I have called this a latitude, which is only an explanation of this general rule—that no vowel can be cut off before another when we cannot sink the pronunciation of it, as _he_, _she_, _me_, _I_, &c. Virgil thinks it sometimes a beauty to imitate the licence of the Greeks, and leave two vowels opening on each other, as in that verse of the third pastoral— “_Et succus pecori_, _et lac subducitur agnis_.”