We lose his spirit when we think
to take his body. The grosser part remains with us, but the soul is
flown away in some noble expression, or some delicate turn of words
or thought. Thus Holyday, who made this way his choice, seized the
meaning of Juvenal, but the poetry has always escaped him.
They who will not grant me that pleasure is one of the ends of
poetry, but that it is only a means of compassing the only end
(which is instruction), must yet allow that without the means of
pleasure the instruction is but a bare and dry philosophy, a crude
preparation of morals which we may have from Aristotle and Epictetus
with more profit than from any poet. Neither Holyday nor Stapleton
have imitated Juvenal in the poetical part of him, his diction, and
his elocution. Nor, had they been poets (as neither of them were),
yet in the way they took, it was impossible for them to have
succeeded in the poetic part.
The English verse which we call heroic consists of no more than ten
syllables; the Latin hexameter sometimes rises to seventeen; as, for
example, this verse in Virgil:-
"Pulverulenta putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum.
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