Ut quamvis avido is too ambitious an ornament to be his,
and gratum opus agricolis are all words unnecessary, and independent
of what he had said before. Horrentia Martis arma is worse than any
of the rest. Horrentia is such a flat epithet as Tully would have
given us in his verses. It is a mere filler to stop a vacancy in
the hexameter, and connect the preface to the work of Virgil.
Our author seems to sound a charge, and begins like the clangour of
a trumpet:-
"Arma, virumque cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris," -
Scarce a word without an r, and the vowels for the greater part
sonorous. The prefacer began with Ille ego, which he was
constrained to patch up in the fourth line with at nunc to make the
sense cohere; and if both those words are not notorious botches I am
much deceived, though the French translator thinks otherwise. For
my own part, I am rather of the opinion that they were added by
Tucca and Varius, than retrenched.
I know it may be answered by such as think Virgil the author of the
four lines--that he asserts his title to the "AEneis" in the
beginning of this work, as he did to the two former, in the last
lines of the fourth Georgic.
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