as requisite in this as in heroic poetry itself, of which the satire
is undoubtedly a species. With these beautiful turns I confess
myself to have been unacquainted till about twenty years ago. In a
conversation which I had with that noble wit of Scotland, Sir George
Mackenzie, he asked me why I did not imitate in my verses the turns
of Mr. Waller and Sir John Denham, of which he repeated many to me.
I had often read with pleasure, and with some profit, those two
fathers of our English poetry, but had not seriously enough
considered those beauties which give the last perfection to their
works. Some sprinklings of this kind I had also formerly in my
plays; but they were casual, and not designed. But this hint, thus
seasonably given me, first made me sensible of my own wants, and
brought me afterwards to seek for the supply of them in other
English authors. I looked over the darling of my youth, the famous
Cowley; there I found, instead of them, the points of wit and quirks
of epigram, even in the "Davideis" (an heroic poem which is of an
opposite nature to those puerilities), but no elegant turns, either
on the word or on the thought. Then I consulted a greater genius
(without offence to the manes of that noble author)--I mean Milton;
but as he endeavours everywhere to express Homer, whose age had not
arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true sublimity, lofty
thoughts which were clothed with admirable Grecisms and ancient
words, which he had been digging from the minds of Chaucer and
Spenser, and which, with all their rusticity, had somewhat of
venerable in them. But I found not there neither that for which I
looked. At last I had recourse to his master, Spenser, the author
of that immortal poem called the "Faerie Queen," and there I met
with that which I had been looking for so long in vain. Spenser had
studied Virgil to as much advantage as Milton had done Homer, and
amongst the rest of his excellences had copied that. Looking