her
kinds of writing; and because more refined, therefore more difficult; and
because more difficult, therefore more rarely attained; and the
non-attainment of it is, as I have said, the source of our vanity. Hence
the poetic clan are more obnoxious to vanity than others. And from vanity
consequently flows that great sensibility of disrespect, that quick
resentment, that tinder of the mind that kindles at every spark, and
justly marks them out for the genus irritabile among mankind. And from
this combustible temper, this serious anger for no very serious things,
things looked on by most as foreign to the important points of life, as
consequentially flows that inheritance of ridicule, which devolves on
them, from generation to generation. As soon as they become authors, they
become like Ben Jonson's angry boy, and learn the art of quarrel.

Concordes animae--dum nocte prementur;
Heu! quantum inter se bellum, si lumina vitae
Attigerint, quantas acies stragemque ciebunt!
Qui Juvenes! quantas ostentant, aspice, vires.
Ne, pueri! ne tanta animis assuescite bella.
Tuque prior, tu parce, genus qui ducis Olympo,
Sidereo flagrans clypeo, et coelestibus armis,
Projice tela manu, sanguis meus!
Nec te ullae facies, non terruit ipse Typhoeus
Arduus, arma tenens; non te Messapus et Ufens,
Contemtorque Deum Mezentius.

VIRG.

But to return. He that has this idea of perfection in the work he
undertakes, however successful he is, will yet be modest; because to rise
up to that idea, which he proposed for his model, is almost, if not
absolutely, impossible.

These two observations account for what may seem as strange, as it is
infallibly true; I mean, they show us why good writers have the lowest,
and bad writers the highest, opinion of their own performances. They who
have only a partial idea of this perfection, as their portion of ignorance
or knowledge of it is greater or less, have proportionable degrees of
modesty or conceit.

Nor, though natural good understanding makes a tolerably just judgment in
things of this nature, will the reader judge the worse, for forming to
himself a notion of what he ought to expect from the piece he has in hand,
before he begins his perusal of it.

The ode, as it is the eldest kind of poetry, so it is more spiritous, and
more remote from prose, than any other, i