Spenser and Milton are the nearest in English to Virgil
and Horace in the Latin, and I have endeavoured to form my style by
imitating their masters. I will farther own to you, my lord, that
my chief ambition is to please those readers who have discernment
enough to prefer Virgil before any other poet in the Latin tongue.
Such spirits as he desired to please, such would I choose for my
judges, and would stand or fall by them alone. Segrais has
distinguished the readers of poetry, according to their capacity of
judging, into three classes (he might have said the same of writers,
too, if he had pleased). In the lowest form he places those whom he
calls les petits esprits--such things as are our upper-gallery
audience in a playhouse, who like nothing but the husk and rind of
wit; prefer a quibble, a conceit, an epigram, before solid sense and
elegant expression. These are mob-readers. If Virgil and Martial
steed for Parliament-men, we know already who would carry it. But
though they make the greatest appearance in the field, and cry the
loudest, the best of it is they are but a sort of French Huguenots,
or Dutch boors, brought ever in herds, but not naturalised, who have
not land of two pounds per annum in Parnassus, and therefore are not
privileged to poll.
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