to
Seu quis Olympiacae miratus praemia palmae, &c.
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.—
Intereà Dryadum silvas saltusque sequamur
Intactos—
Te sine nil—
Rumpe moras: vocat ingenti clamore Cithaeron
Taygetique canes, domitrixque Epidaurus EQUORUM,
Et vox assensu nemorum ingeminata REMUGIT.
Seu quis Olympiacae miratus praemia palmae
Pascit EQUOS; seu quis fortes ad aratra JUVENCOS.
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.
Cum tabulis animum censoris sumet honesti;
Audebit quaecunque parum splendoris habebunt
Et sine pondere erunt, et honore indigne feruntur,
Verba movere loco; quamvis invita recedant,
Et versentur adhuc intra penetralia Vestae.
[2 Ep. ii. 110.]
[38] [B. ix. v. 641.]
[39] Notes on the story of Phaëton. [v. 23.]
[40] Jacobi Philippi D’ Orville Animadversiones in Charit. Aphrod. lib. iv. c. 4.
[41] Ibid. vol. ii. p. 325.