(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days."
It is with no desire to impair our admiration of these noble lines that I would ask, if that graceful glorifying of Fame as "the last infirmity of noble minds" was not suggested by the profound remark of Tacitus, in his character of the stoical republican, Helvidius Priscus (Hist., l. iv. c. 6.):
"Erant, quibus appetentior famæ videretur, quando etiam sapientibus cupido gloriæ novissima exuitur."
The great Englishman has condensed and intensified the expression of the concise and earnest Roman. This is one of those delightful obligations which repay themselves: Milton has more than returned the favour of the borrowed thought by lending it a heightened expression.
Thomas H. Gill.
Minor Notes.
Note by Warton on Aristotle's "Poetics."—Some of your correspondents having expressed a wish that the MS. remarks of eminent scholars, when met with by your readers, might be communicated to the world through your pages, I beg to send you the following observations, signed J. Warton, which I have found on the blank leaf of a copy of Aristotle's Poetics (edit. of Ruddimannos, Edinb. 1731):—
"To attempt to understand poetry without having diligently digested this treatise, would be as absurd and impossible as to pretend to a skill in geometry without having studied Euclid. The fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth chapters, wherein he has pointed out the properest methods of exciting terror and pity, convince us that he was intimately acquainted with those objects which most forcibly affect the heart. The prime excellence of this precious treatise is the scholastic precision and philosophical clearness with which the subject is handled, without any address to the passions or imagination. It is to be lamented that the part of the Poeticks in which he has given precepts for comedy did not likewise descend to posterity."