Note 37 — NOTES ON THE EPISTLE TO AUGUSTUS.

In these lines,

Which I suspect not to have been from the hand of Virgil. And,

I. On account of some peculiarities in the expression.

1. Accingar is of frequent use in the best authors, to denote a readiness and resolution to do any thing; but as joined with an infinitive mood, accingar dicere, I do not remember to have ever seen it. ’Tis often used by Virgil, but, if the several places be consulted, it will always be found with an accusative and preposition, expressed, or understood, as magicas accingier artes, or with an accusative and dative, as accingere se praedae, or lastly, with an ablative, expressing the instrument, as accingor ferro. La Cerda, in his notes upon the place, seemed sensible of the objection, and therefore wrote, Graeca locutio: the common, but paltry, shift of learned critics, when they determine, at any rate, to support an ancient reading.

2. Ardentes pugnas, burning battles, sounds well enough to a modern ear, but I much doubt, if it would have passed in the times of Virgil. At least, I recollect no such expression in all his works; ardens being constantly joined to a word, denoting a substance of apparent light, heat, or flame, to which the allusion is easy, as ardentes gladios, ardentes oculos, campos armis sublimibus ardentes, and, by an easy metaphor, ardentes hostes, but no where, that I can find, to so abstract a notion, as that of fight. It seems to be to avoid this difficulty, that some have chosen to read ardentis, in the genitive, which yet Servius rejects as of no authority.

3. But the most glaring note of illegitimacy is in the line,

It has puzzled all the commentators from old Servius down to the learned Mr. Martyn, to give any tolerable account of the poet’s choice of Tithonus, from whom to derive the ancestry of Augustus, rather than Anchises, or Assaracus, who were not only more famous, but in the direct line. The pretences of any or all of them are too frivolous to make it necessary to spend a thought about them. The instance stands single in antiquity: much less is there any thing like it to be found in the Augustan poets.

II. But the phraseology of these lines is the least of my objection. Were it ever so accurate, there is besides, on the first view, a manifest absurdity in the subject-matter of them. For would any writer, of but common skill in the art of composition, close a long and elaborate allegory, the principal grace of which consists in its very mystery, with a cold, and formal explanation of it? Or would he pay so poor a compliment to his patron, as to suppose his sagacity wanted the assistance of this additional triplet to lead him into the true meaning? Nothing can be more abhorrent from the usual address and artifice of Virgil’s manner. Or,

III. Were the subject-matter itself passable, yet, how, in defiance of all the laws of disposition, came it to be forced in here? Let the reader turn to the passage, and he will soon perceive, that this could never be the place for it. The allegory being concluded, the poet returns to his subject, which is proposed in the six following lines:

Would now any one expect, that the poet, after having conducted the reader, thus respectfully, to the very threshold of his subject, should immediately run away again to the point, from which he had set out, and this on so needless an errand, as the letting him into the secret of his allegory?

But this inserted triplet agrees as ill with what follows, as with what precedes it. For how abrupt is the transition, and unlike the delicate connexion, so studiously contrived by the Augustan poets, from

to

When omit but these interpolated lines, and see how gracefully, and by how natural a succession of ideas, the poet slides into the main of his subject.—

On the whole, I have not the least doubt, that the lines before us are the spurious offspring of some later poet; if indeed the writer of them deserve that name; for, whoever he was, he is so far from partaking of the original spirit of Virgil, that, at most he appears to have been but a servile and paltry mimic of Ovid; from the opening of whose Metamorphosis the design was clearly taken. The turn of the thought is evidently the same in both, and even the expression. Mutatas dicere formas is echoed by ardentes dicere pugnas: dicere fert animus, is, by an affected improvement, accingar dicere: and Tithoni primâ ab origine is almost literally the same as primâque ab origine mundi. For the insertion of these lines in this place, I leave it to the curious to conjecture of it, as they may: but in the mean time, must esteem the office of the true critic to be so far resembling that of the poet himself, as, within some proper limitations, to justify the honest liberty here taken.