Te spectem, suprema mihi cùm venerit hora, Before my closing eyes, dear Cynthia, stand, To these lines Ovid thus refers in his elegy on the death of Tibullus: Cynthia decedens, felicius, inquit, amata Sum tibi; vixisti dum tuus ignis eram, Cui Nemesis, quid, ait, tibi sunt mea damna dolori? Bless'd was my reign, retiring Cynthia cried : The fainting trembling hand was mine alone. The beauty of this passage, which consists in the appropriation made by Nemesis of the line originally directed to Cynthia, had been wholly imperceptible to succeeding ages, had chance, which has detroyed so many greater volumes, deprived us likewise of poems of Tibullus. the T. No. 59. TUESDAY, MAY 29, 1753. -Si Pieriá Quadrans tibi nullus in Arcá If not a souse in thy lank purse appear, Juv. THE indigence of authors, and particularly of poets, has long been the object of lamentation and ridicule, of compassion and contempt. It has been observed that not one favourite of the Muses has ever been able to build a house since the days of Amphion, whose art it would be fortunate for them if they possessed; and that the greatest punishment that can possibly be inflicted on them is to oblige them to sup in their own lodgings. Molles ubi reddunt ova columbæ. Where pigeons lay their eggs. Boileau introduces Damon, whose writings entertained and instructed the city and the court, as having passed the summer without a shirt, and the winter without a cloak; and resolving at last to forsake Paris, -où la vertu n'a plus ni feu ni lieu; Where shivering worth no longer finds a home; and to find out a retreat in some distant grotto, D' où jamais ni l'huissier, ni le sergent n' approche; POPE. "The rich Comedian," says Bruyere, "lolling in his gilt chariot, bespatters the face of Corneille walking afoot:" and Juvenal remarks that his contemporary bards generally qualified themselves by their diet, to make excellent bustos; that they were compelled sometimes to hire lodgings at a baker's, in order to warm themselves for nothing; and that it was the common fate of the fraternity. Pallere, et vinum toto nescire Decembri. -To pine, Look pale, and all December taste no wine. DRYDEN. Virgil himself is strongly suspected to have lain in the streets, or on some Roman bulk, when he speaks so feelingly of a rainy and tempestuous night in his well known epigram. "There ought to be an hospital founded for decayed wits," said a lively Frenchman," and it might be called an hospital of incurables." Few, perhaps, wander among the laurels of Parnassus, but who have reason ardently to wish and to exclaim with Æneas, but without the hero's good fortune, Si nunc se nobis ille aureus arbore ramus O! in this ample grove could I behold The tree that blooms with vegetable gold. PITT. The patronage of Lelius and Scipio did not enable Terence to rent a house. Tasso, in a humorous sonnet addressed to his favourite cat, earnestly entreats her to lend him the light of her eyes during his moonlight studies, not being himself able to purchase a candle to write by. Dante, the Homer of Italy, and Camoens of Portugal, were both banished and imprisoned. Cervantes, perhaps the most original genius the world ever beheld, perished by want in the streets of Madrid, as did our own Spenser at Dublin. And a writer little inferior to the Spaniard in the exquisiteness of his humour and raillery, I mean Erasmus, after the tedious wanderings of many years, from city to city, and from patron to patron, praised, and promised, and deceived by all, obtained no settlement but with his printer. At last," says he, in one of his epistles, "I should have been advanced to a cardinalship, if there had not been a decree in my way, by which those are secluded from this honour whose income amounts not to three thousand ducats." I remember to have read a satire in Latin prose intituled, "A Poet hath bought a House." The poet having purchased a house, the matter was immediately laid before the parliament of poets assembled on that important occasion, as a thing unheard of, as a very bad precedent, and of most pernicious consequence; and, accordingly, a very severe sentence was pronounced against the buyer. When the members came to give their votes, it appeared there was not a single person in the assembly who through the favour of powerful patrons, or their own happy genius, was worth so much as to be proprietor of a house, either by inheritance or purchase: all of them neglecting their private fortunes, confessed and boasted that they lived in lodgings. The poet was, therefore, ordered to sell his house immediately, to buy wine with the money for their entertainment, in order to make some expiation for his enormous crime, and to teach him to live unsettled and without care like a true poet. Such are the ridiculous and such the pitiable stories related to expose the poverty of poets in different ages and nations; but which, I am inclined to think, are rather the boundless exaggeration of satire and fancy, than the sober result of experience and the determination of truth and judgment: for the general position may be contradicted by numerous examples: and it may, perhaps, appear on reflection and examination, that the art is not chargeable with the faults and failings of its peculiar professors, that it has no peculiar tendency to make men either rakes or spendthrifts, and that those who are indigent poets would have been indigent merchants and mechanics. The neglect of economy, in which great geniuses are supposed to have indulged themselves, has unfortunately given so much authority and justification to carelessness and extravagance that many a minute rhymer has fallen into dissipation and drunkenness, because Butler and Otway lived and died in an alehouse. As a certain blockhead wore his 66 gown on one shoulder to mimic the negligence of Sir Thomas More, so these servile imitators follow their masters in all that disgraced them; contract immoderate debts, because Dryden died insolvent; and neglect to change their linen, because Smith was a sloven. If I should happen to look pale," says Horace, "all the hackney-writers in Rome would immediately drink cummin to gain the same complexion." And I myself am acquainted with a witling who uses a glass, only because Pope was near-sighted. I can easily conceive, that a mind occupied and overwhelmed with the weight and immensity of its own conceptions, glancing with astonishing rapidity from heaven to earth, and from earth to heaven, cannot willingly submit to the dull drudgery of examining the justness and accuracy of a butcher's bill. To descend from the widest and most comprehensive views of nature, and weigh out hops for a brewing, must be invincibly disgusting to a true genius: to be able to build imaginary palaces of the most exquisite architecture, but yet not to pay a carpenter's bill, is a cutting mortification and disgrace to be ruined by pursuing the precepts of Virgilian agriculture, and by ploughing classically, without attending to the wholesome monitions of low British farmers, is a circumstance that aggravates the failure of a crop to a man who wishes to have lived in the Augustan age, and despises the system of modern husbandry. Many poets, however, may be found, who have condescended to the cares of economy, and who have conducted their families with all the parsimony and regularity of an alderman of the last century; who have not superciliously disdained to enter into the concerns of common life, and to subscribe to and study certain necessary dogmas of the vulgar, |