Thus curious was Virgil in diversifying his subjects. But M. Fontenelle is a great deal too uniform: begin where you please, the subject is still the same. We find it true what he says of himself, _Toûjours, toûjours de l'amour._ He seems to take pastorals and love-verses for the same thing. Has human nature no other passion? Does not fear, ambition, avarice, pride, a capriccio of honour, and laziness itself, often triumph over love? But this passion does all, not only in pastorals, but in modern tragedies too. A hero can no more fight, or be sick, or die, than he can be born, without a woman. But dramatics have been composed in compliance to the humour of the age, and the prevailing inclination of the great, whose example has a more powerful influence, not only in the little court behind the scenes, but on the great theatre of the world. However, this inundation of love-verses is not so much an effect of their amorousness, as of immoderate self-love; this being the only sort of poetry, in which the writer can, not only without censure, but even with commendation, talk of himself. There is generally more of the passion of Narcissus, than concern for Chloris and Corinna, in this whole affair. Be pleased to look into almost any of those writers, and you shall meet everywhere that eternal _Moi_, which the admirable Pascal so judiciously condemns. Homer can never be enough admired for this one so particular quality, that he never speaks of himself, either in the Iliad or the Odysseys: and, if Horace had never told us his genealogy, but left it to the writer of his life, perhaps he had not been a loser by it. This consideration might induce those great critics, Varius and Tucca, to raze out the four first verses of the "Æneïs," in great measure, for the sake of that unlucky _Ille ego_. But extraordinary geniuses have a sort of prerogative, which may dispense them from laws, binding to subject wits. However, the ladies have the less reason to be pleased with those addresses, of which the poet takes the greater share to himself. Thus the beau presses into their dressing-room; but it is not so much to adore their fair eyes, as to adjust his own steenkirk and peruke, and set his countenance in their glass.