stumble, that you may think him in great hazard of breaking his neck, while at the same time he is only giving you a proof of his dexterity. My late Lord Roscommon was often pleased with this reflection, and with the examples of it in this admirable author. I have not leisure to run through the whole comparison of lights and shadows with tropes and figures; yet I cannot but take notice of metaphors, which like them have power to lessen or greaten any thing. Strong and glowing colours are the just resemblances of bold metaphors: but both must be judiciously applied; for there is a difference betwixt daring and fool-hardiness. Lucan and Statius often ventured them too far; our Virgil never. But the great defect of the “Pharsalia” and the “Thebais” was in the design: if that had been more perfect, we might have forgiven many of their bold strokes in the colouring, or at least excused them: yet some of them are such as Demosthenes or Cicero could not have defended. Virgil, if he could have seen the first verses of the “Sylvæ,”[139] would have thought Statius mad, in his fustian description of the statue on the brazen horse. But that poet was always in a foam at his setting out, even before the motion of the race had warmed him. The soberness of Virgil, whom he read, it seems, to little purpose, might have shewn him the difference betwixt _Arma virumque cano——_ and _Magnanimum Æacidem, formidatamque tonanti_ _Progeniem._ But Virgil knew how to rise by degrees in his expressions: Statius was in his towering heights at the first stretch of his pinions. The description of his running horse, just starting in the Funeral Games for Archemorus, though the verses are wonderfully fine, are the true image of their author: _Stare adeò nescit, pereunt vestigia mille_ _Ante fugam; absentemque ferit gravis ungula campum;_[140] which would cost me an hour, if I had the leisure to translate them, there is so much of beauty in the original. Virgil, as he better knew his colours, so he knew better how and where to place them. In as much haste as I am, I cannot forbear giving one example. It is said of him, that he read the Second, Fourth, and Sixth Books of his Æneids to Augustus Cæsar. In the Sixth, (which we are sure he read, because we know Octavia was present, who rewarded him so bountifully for the twenty verses which were made in honour of her deceased son, Marcellus,)[141]—in this Sixth Book, I say, the poet, speaking of Misenus, the trumpeter, says, _——quo non præstantior alter_ _Ære ciere viros,——_ and broke off in the hemistic, or midst of the verse; but in the very reading, seized as it were with a divine fury, he made up the latter part of the hemistic with these following words, _——martemque accendere cantu._