To moralise this
story, Virgil is the Apollo who has this dispensing power. His
great judgment made the laws of poetry, but he never made himself a
slave to them; chronology at best is but a cobweb law, and he broke
through it with his weight. They who will imitate him wisely must
choose, as he did, an obscure and a remote era, where they may
invent at pleasure, and not be easily contradicted. Neither he nor
the Romans had ever read the Bible, by which only his false
computation of times can be made out against him. This Segrais says
in his defence, and proves it from his learned friend Bochartus,
whose letter on this subject he has printed at the end of the fourth
AEneid, to which I refer your lordship and the reader. Yet the
credit of Virgil was so great that he made this fable of his own
invention pass for an authentic history, or at least as credible as
anything in Homer. Ovid 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 ingrateful 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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