If this could be excusable in
any writer, it would be in Ovid where he introduces the Echo as a
nymph, before she was worn away into nothing but a voice. The
learned Erasmus, though a man of wit and genius, has composed a
dialogue upon this silly kind of device, and made use of an Echo,
who seems to have been a very extraordinary linguist, for she
answers the person she talks with in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew,
according as she found the syllables which she was to repeat in any
of those learned languages. Hudibras, in ridicule of this false
kind of wit, has described Bruin bewailing the loss of his bear to
the solitary Echo, who is of great use to the poet in several
distiches, as she does not only repeat after him, but helps out his
verse, and furnishes him with rhymes:-
He raged, and kept as heavy a coil as
Stout Hercules for loss of Hylas;
Forcing the valleys to repeat
The accents of his sad regret;
He beat his breast, and tore his hair,
For loss of his dear crony bear:
That Echo from the hollow ground
His doleful wailings did resound
More wistfully by many times,
Than in small poets' splay-foot rhymes,
That make her, in their rueful stories,
To answer to int'rogatories,
And most unconscionably depose
Things of which she nothing knows;
And when she has said all she can say,
'Tis wrested to the lover's fancy.
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