I have omitted the four preliminary lines of the First Æneïd, because I think them inferior to any four others in the whole poem, and consequently believe they are not Virgil's.[89] There is too great a gap betwixt the adjective _vicina_ in the second line, and the substantive _arva_ in the latter end of the third, which keeps his meaning in obscurity too long, and is contrary to the clearness of his style. _Ut quamvis avido_ is too ambitious an ornament to be his; and _Gratum opus agricolis_, are all words unnecessary, and independent of what he had said before. ------_Horrentia Martis Arma_------ is worse than any of the rest. _Horrentia_ is such a flat epithet, as Tully would have given us in his verses. It is a mere filler, to stop a vacancy in the hexameter, and connect the preface to the work of Virgil. Our author seems to sound a charge, and begins like the clangor of a trumpet: _Arma, virumque cano, Trojæ qui primus ab oris_ ... scarce a word without an _r_, and the vowels, for the greater part, sonorous. The prefacer began with _Ille ego_, which he was constrained to patch up in the fourth line with _at nunc_, to make the sense cohere; and, if both those words are not notorious botches, I am much deceived, though the French translator thinks otherwise. For my own part, I am rather of the opinion, that they were added by Tucca and Varius, than retrenched. I know it may be answered, by such as think Virgil the author of the four lines, that he asserts his title to the Æneïs in the beginning of this work, as he did to the two former in the last lines of the Fourth Georgic. I will not reply otherwise to this, than by desiring them to compare these four lines with the four others, which we know are his, because no poet but he alone could write them. If they cannot distinguish creeping from flying, let them lay down Virgil, and take up Ovid, _de Ponto_, in his stead. My master needed not the assistance of that preliminary poet to prove his claim. His own majestic mien discovers him to be the king, amidst a thousand courtiers. It was a superfluous office; and, therefore, I would not set those verses in the front of Virgil, but have rejected them[90] to my own preface. I, who before, with shepherds in the groves, Sung, to my oaten pipe, their rural loves, And, issuing thence, compelled the neighbouring field A plenteous crop of rising corn to yield, Manured the glebe, and stocked the fruitful plain, (A poem grateful to the greedy swain,) &c.