Without this ambition which I own, of desiring to please the _judices natos_, I could never have been able to have done anything at this age, when the fire of poetry is commonly extinguished in other men. Yet Virgil has given me the example of Entellus for my encouragement; when he was well heated, the younger champion could not stand before him. And we find the elder contended not for the gift, but for the honour (_nec dona moror_); for Dampier has informed us in his “Voyages” that the air of the country which produces gold is never wholesome. I had long since considered that the way to please the best judges is not to translate a poet literally, and Virgil least of any other; for his peculiar beauty lying in his choice of words, I am excluded from it by the narrow compass of our heroic verse, unless I would make use of monosyllables only, and these clogged with consonants, which are the dead weight of our mother tongue. It is possible, I confess, though it rarely happens, that a verse of monosyllables may sound harmoniously; and some examples of it I have seen. My first line of the “Æneis” is not harsh— “Arms, and the man I sing, who forced by Fate,” &c.— but a much better instance may be given from the last line of Manilius, made English by our learned and judicious Mr. Creech— “Nor could the world have borne so fierce a flame”— where the many liquid consonants are placed so artfully that they give a pleasing sound to the words, though they are all of one syllable. It is true, I have been sometimes forced upon it in other places of this work, but I never did it out of choice: I was either in haste, or Virgil gave me no occasion for the ornament of words; for it seldom happens but a monosyllable line turns verse to prose, and even that prose is rugged and unharmonious. Philarchus, I remember, taxes Balzac for placing twenty monosyllables in file without one dissyllable betwixt them.