It often happens that an author's reputation is endangered in succeeding times, by that which raised the loudest applause among his contemporaries: nothing is read with greater pleasure than allusions to recent facts, reigning opinions, or present controversies; but when facts are forgotten, and controversies extinguished, these favourite touches lose all their graces; and the author in his descent to posterity must be left to the mercy of chance, without any power of ascertaining the memory of those things, to which he owed his luckiest thoughts and his kindest reception. On such occasions, every reader should remember the diffidence of Socrates, and repair by his candour the injuries of time: he should impute the seeming defects of his author to some chasm of intelligence, and suppose that the sense which is now weak was once forcible, and the expression which is now dubious formerly determinate. How much the mutilation of ancient history has taken away from the beauty of poetical performances, may be conjectured from the light which a lucky commentator sometimes effuses, by the recovery of an incident that had been long forgotten: thus, in the third book of Horace, Juno's denunciations against, those that should presume to raise again the walls of Troy, could for many ages please only by splendid images and swelling language, of which no man discovered the use or propriety, till Le Fevre, by showing on what occasion the Ode was written, changed wonder to rational delight. Many passages yet undoubtedly remain in the same author, which an exacter knowledge of the incidents of his time would clear from objections. Among these I have always numbered the following lines: _Aurum per medios ire satellites, Et perrumpere amat saxa, potentius Ictu fulmineo. Concidit auguris Argivi domus ob lucrum Demersa exitio. Diffidit urbium Portas vir Macedo, et subruit aemulos Regis muneribus_: Munera navium Saevos illaqueant duces. HOR. Lib. iii. Ode xvi. 9. Stronger than thunder's winged force, All-powerful gold can spread its course, Thro' watchful guards its passage make, And loves thro' solid walls to break: From gold the overwhelming woes That crush'd the Grecian augur rose: Philip with gold thro' cities broke, And rival monarchs felt his yoke; _Captains of ships to gold are slaves, Tho' fierce as their own winds and waves._ FRANCIS.