What I have said, though it has the face of arrogance, yet is intended for the honour of my country; and therefore I will boldly own, that this English translation has more of Virgil's spirit in it, than either the French or the Italian. Some of our countrymen have translated episodes and other parts of Virgil, with great success; as particularly your lordship, whose version of Orpheus and Eurydice is eminently good. Amongst the dead authors, the Silenus of my Lord Roscommon cannot be too much commended. I say nothing of Sir John Denham, Mr Waller, and Mr Cowley;[79] it is the utmost of my ambition to be thought their equal, or not to be much inferior to them, and some others of the living. But it is one thing to take pains on a fragment, and translate it perfectly; and another thing to have the weight of a whole author on my shoulders. They who believe the burden light, let them attempt the fourth, sixth, or eighth Pastoral; the first or fourth Georgic; and, amongst the Æneïds, the fourth, the fifth, the seventh, the ninth, the tenth, the eleventh, or the twelfth; for in these I think I have succeeded best. Long before I undertook this work, I was no stranger to the original. I had also studied Virgil's design, his disposition of it, his manners, his judicious management of the figures, the sober retrenchments of his sense, which always leave somewhat to gratify our imagination, on which it may enlarge at pleasure; but, above all, the elegance of his expressions, and the harmony of his numbers: for, as I have said in a former dissertation, the words are, in poetry, what the colours are in painting; if the design be good, and the draught be true, the colouring is the first beauty that strikes the eye.[80] Spenser and Milton are the nearest, in English, to Virgil and Horace in the Latin; and I have endeavoured to form my style by imitating their masters. I will further own to you, my lord, that my chief ambition is to please those readers who have discernment enough to prefer Virgil before any other poet in the Latin tongue. Such spirits as he desired to please, such would I chuse for my judges, and would stand or fall by them alone. Ségrais has distinguished the readers of poetry, according to their capacity of judging, into three classes; (he might have said the same of writers too, if he had pleased.) In the lowest form he places those whom he calls _les petits esprits_--such things as are our upper-gallery audience in a playhouse, who like nothing but the husk and rind of wit; prefer a quibble, a conceit, an epigram, before solid sense and elegant expression; these are mob readers. If Virgil and Martial stood for parliament-men, we know already who would carry it. But, though they make the greatest appearance in the field, and cry the loudest, the best on't is, they are but a sort of French Huguenots, or Dutch boors, brought over in herds, but not naturalized; who have not land