Bouhours, whom I look upon to be the most penetrating of all the
French critics, has taken pains to show that it is impossible for
any thought to be beautiful which is not just, and has not its
foundation in the nature of things; that the basis of all wit is
truth; and that no thought can be valuable of which good sense is
not the groundwork. Boileau has endeavoured to inculcate the same
notion in several parts of his writings, both in prose and verse.
This is that natural way of writing, that beautiful simplicity which
we so much admire in the compositions of the ancients, and which
nobody deviates from but those who want strength of genius to make a
thought shine in its own natural beauties. Poets who want this
strength of genius to give that majestic simplicity to nature, which
we so much admire in the works of the ancients, are forced to hunt
after foreign ornaments, and not to let any piece of wit of what
kind soever escape them. I look upon these writers as Goths in
poetry, who, like those in architecture, not being able to come up
to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks and Romans, have
endeavoured to supply its place with all the extravagancies of an
irregular fancy. Mr. Dryden makes a very handsome observation on
Ovid's writing a letter from Dido to AEneas, in the following words:
"Ovid," says he, speaking of Virgil's fiction of Dido and AEneas,
"takes it up after him, even in the same age, and makes an ancient
heroine of Virgil's new-created Dido; dictates a letter for her just
before her death to the ungrateful fugitive, and, very unluckily for
himself, is for measuring a sword with a man so much superior in
force to him on the same subject.
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