Be sure yourself and your own reach to know,
How far your genius, taste, and learning go;
Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet,
And mark that point where sense and dulness meet.
* * * * *
Like Kings we lose the conquests gain'd before,
By vain ambition still to make them more:
Each might his servile province well command,
Would all but stoop to what they understand.
71.—A cunning phrase.] Callida junctura.
Jason de Nores and many other interpreters agree that Horace here recommends, after Aristotle, the artful elevation of style by the use of common words in an uncommon sense, producing at once an air of familiarity and magnificence. Some however confine the expression, callida junctura, to signify compound words. The Author of the English Commentary adopts the first construction; but considers the precept in both senses, and illustrates each by many beautiful examples from the plays of Shakespeare. These examples he has accompanied with much elegant and judicious observation, as the reader of taste will be convinced by the following short extracts.
"The writers of that time had so latinized the English language, that the pure English Idiom, which Shakespeare generally follows, has all the air of novelty, which other writers are used to affect by foreign phraseology.—In short, the articles here enumerated are but so many ways of departing from the usual and simpler forms of speech, without neglecting too much the grace of ease and perspicuity; in which well-tempered licence one of the greatest charms of all poetry, but especially of Shakespeare's poetry, consists. Not that he was always and every where so happy. His expression sometimes, and by the very means, here exemplified, becomes hard, obscure, and unnatural. This is the extreme on the other side. But in general, we may say, that He hath either followed the direction of Horace very ably, or hath hit upon his rule very happily."
76.—THE STRAIT-LAC'D CETHEGI.] CINCTUTIS Cethegis. Jason de Nores differs, and I think very justly, from those who interpret Cinctutis to signify loose, bare, or naked—EXERTOS & NUDOS. The plain sense of the radical word cingo is directly opposite. The word cinctutis is here assumed to express a severity of manners by an allusion to an antique gravity of dress; and the Poet, adds de Nores, very happily forms a new word himself, as a vindication and example of the licence he recommends. Cicero numbers M. Corn. Cethegus among the old Roman Orators; and Horace himself again refers to the Cethegi in his Epistle to Florus, and on the subject of the use of words.
Obscurata diu papula bonus eruet, atque
Proseret in lucem speciosa vocabula rer*um;
***need a Latin speaker to check this out***
Quae priscis memorata CATONIBUS atque CETHEGIS,
Nunc situs informis premit & deserta vetustas;
Adsciscet nova quae genitor produxerit usus.
Mark where a bold expressive phrase appears,
Bright thro' the rubbish of some hundred years;
Command old words that long have slept, to wake,
Words, that wife Bacon, or brave Raleigh spake;
Or bid the new be English, ages hence,
For Use will father what's begot by Sense.