"I see a prodigious number of plays," said Candide, "in Italian, Spanish, and French."
"Yes," replied the Venetian, "there are, I think, three thousand, and not three dozen of them good for anything. As to these huge volumes of divinity, and those enormous collections of sermons, they are not altogether worth one single page in Seneca; and I fancy you will readily believe that neither myself, nor any one else, ever looks into them."
Martin, perceiving some shelves filled with English books, said to the senator:
"I fancy that a republican must be highly delighted with those books, which are most of them written with a noble spirit of freedom."
"It is noble to write as we think," said Pococurante; "it is the privilege of humanity. Throughout Italy we write only what we do not think; and the present inhabitants of the country of the Cæsars and Antoninuses dare not acquire a single idea without the permission of a father dominican. I should be enamoured of the spirit of the English nation, did it not utterly frustrate the good effects it would produce, by passion and the spirit of party."
Candide, seeing a Milton, asked the senator if he did not think that author a great man?
"Who?" said Pococurante, sharply; "that barbarian who writes a tedious commentary in ten books of rambling verse on the first chapter of Genesis? that slovenly imitator of the Greeks, who disfigures the creation by making the Messiah take a pair of compasses from heaven's armory to plan the world; whereas Moses represented the Deity as producing the whole universe by his fiat? Can I, think you, have any esteem for a writer who has spoiled Tasso's hell and the devil? who transforms Lucifer sometimes into a toad, and at others, into a pigmy? who makes him say the same thing over again an hundred times? who metamorphoses him into a school-divine? and who, by an absurdly serious imitation of Ariosto's comic invention of fire-arms, represents the devils and angels cannonading each other in heaven? Neither I nor any other Italian can possibly take pleasure in such melancholy reveries; but the marriage of sin and death, and snakes issuing from the womb of the former, are enough to make any person sick that is not lost to all sense of delicacy. This obscene, whimsical, and disagreeable poem, met with the neglect it deserved at its first publication; and I only treat the author now as he was treated in his own country by his contemporaries."
Candide was sensibly grieved at this speech, as he had a great respect for Homer, and was very fond of Milton.
"Alas!" said he softly to Martin, "I am afraid this man holds our German poets in great contempt."
"There would be no such great harm in that," said Martin.