Who, then, can pass for an inventor if Homer
as well as Virgil must be deprived of that glory! Is Versailles the
less a new building because the architect of that palace hath
imitated others which were built before it? Walls, doors and
windows, apartments, offices, rooms of convenience and magnificence,
are in all great houses. So descriptions, figures, fables, and the
rest, must be in all heroic poems; they are the common materials of
poetry, furnished from the magazine of nature: every poet hath as
much right to them as every man hath to air or water
"Quid prohibetis aquas? Usus communis aquarum est."
But the argument of the work (that is to say, its principal action),
the economy and disposition of it--these are the things which
distinguish copies from originals. The Poet who borrows nothing
from others is yet to be born; he and the Jews' Messias will come
together. There are parts of the "AEneis" which resemble some parts
both of the "Ilias" and of the "Odysses;" as, for example, AEneas
descended into hell, and Ulysses had been there before him; AEneas
loved Dido, and Ulysses loved Calypso: in few words, Virgil hath
imitated Homer's "Odysses" in his first six books, and in his six
last the "Ilias.
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