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Cicero and Ovid have on very different occasions remarked how little of the honour of a victory belongs to the general, when his soldiers and his fortune have made their deductions; yet why should Ovid be suspected to have owed to Tully an observation which perhaps occurs to every man that sees or hears of military glories?

Tully observes of Achilles, that had not Homer written, his valour had been without praise:

Nisi Ilias illa extitisset,
idem tumulus qui corpus ejus contexerat,
nomen ejus obruisset.

Unless the Iliad had been published,
his name had been lost in the
tomb that covered his body.

Horace tells us with more energy that there were brave men before the wars of Troy, but they were lost in oblivion for want of a poet:

Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona
Multi; sed omnes illachrymabiles
Urgentur, ignotique longa
Nocte, carent quia vate sacro.

Before great Agamemnon reign’d,
Reign’d kings as great as he, and brave,
Whose huge ambition’s now contain’d
In the small compass of a grave:
In endless night they sleep, unwept, unknown:
No bard had they to make all time their own.
FRANCIS.

Tully inquires, in the same oration, why, but for fame, we disturb a short life with so many fatigues?

Quid est quod in hoc tam exiguo vitae curriculo et tam brevi, tantis nos in laboribus exerceamus?

Why in so small a circuit of life should we employ ourselves in so many fatigues?

Horace inquires in the same manner,

Quid brevi fortes jaculamur aevo
Multa?

Why do we aim, with eager strife,
At things beyond the mark of life?
FRANCIS.

when our life is of so short duration, why we form such numerous designs? But Horace, as well as Tully, might discover that records are needful to preserve the memory of actions, and that no records were so durable as poems; either of them might find out that life is short, and that we consume it in unnecessary labour.

There are other flowers of fiction so widely scattered and so easily cropped, that it is scarcely just to tax the use of them as an act by which any particular writer is despoiled of his garland; for they may be said to have been planted by the ancients in the open road of poetry for the accommodation of their successors, and to be the right of every one that has art to pluck them without injuring their colours or their fragrance. The passage of Orpheus to hell, with the recovery and second loss of Eurydice, have been described after Boetius by Pope, in such a manner as might justly leave him suspected of imitation, were not the images such as they might both have derived from more ancient writers.

Quae sontes agitant metu,
Ultrices scelerum deae
Jam masta: lacrymis madent,
Non Ixionium caput
Velox praecipitat rota.

The pow’rs of vengeance, while they hear,
Touch’d with compassion, drop a tear:
Ixion’s rapid wheel is bound,
Fix’d in attention to the sound.
F. LEWIS.

Thy stone, O Sysiphus, stands still,
Ixion rests upon the wheel,
And the pale spectres dance!
The furies sink upon their iron beds.
POPE

Tandem, vincimur, arbiter
Umbrarum, miserans, ait–
Donemus, comitem viro,
Emtam carmine, conjugem.

Subdu’d at length, Hell’s pitying monarch cry’d,
The song rewarding, let us yield the bride.
F. LEWIS.

He sung; and hell consented
To hear the poet’s prayer;
Stern Proserpine relented,
And gave him back the fair.
POPE

Heu, noctis prope terminos
Orpheus Eurydicen suam
Vidit, perdidit, occidit.

Nor yet the golden verge of day begun,
When Orpheus, her unhappy lord,
Eurydice to life restor’d,
At once beheld, and lost, and was undone.
F. LEWIS.

But soon, too soon, the lover turns his eyes:
Again she falls, again she dies, she dies!
POPE.