toric, but they are not the persons I am here concerned to account for.

The last circumstance I shall mention, which gave the ancients a greater pleasure in the reading of their own authors than we are capable of, is that knowledge they had of the sound and harmony of their language, which the moderns have at present a very imperfect notion of. We find, even in music, that different nations have different tastes of it, and those who most agree have some particular manner and graces proper to themselves, that are not so agreeable to a foreigner: whether or no it be that, as the temper of the climates varies, it causes an alteration in the animal spirits, and the organs of hearing; or as such passions reign most in such a country, so the sounds are most pleasing that most affect those passions; or that the sounds, which the ear has ever been most accustomed to, insensibly conform the secret texture of it to themselves, and wear in it such passages as are best fitted for their own reception; or, in the last place, that our national prejudice, and narrowness of mind, makes everything appear odd to us that is new and uncommon : whether any one, or all of these reasons may be looked upon as the cause, we find by certain experience, that what is tuneful in one country, is harsh and ungrateful in another. And if this consideration holds in musical sounds, it does much more in those that are articulate, because there is a greater variety of syllables than of notes, and the ear is more accustomed to speech than songs. But had we never so good an ear, we have still a faltering tongue, and a kind of impediment in our speech. Our pronunciation is, without doubt, very widely different from that of the Greeks and Romans; and our voices, in respect of theirs, are so out of tune, that, should an ancient hear us, he would think we were reading in another tongue, and scarce be able to know his own composure, by our repetition of it. We may be sure, therefore, whatever imaginary notions we may frame to ourselves, of the harmony of an author, they are very different from the ideas which the author himself had of his own performance.

Thus we see how time has quite worn out, or decayed, several beauties1 of our ancient authors; but to make a little 1 Decayed several beauties.] It is not exact to use the verb decay ac tively.

amends for the graces they have lost, there are some few others which they have gathered from their great age and antiquity in the world. And here we may first observe, how very few passages in their style appear flat and low to a modern reader, or carry in them a mean and vulgar air of expression; which certainly arises, in a great measure, from the death and disuse of the languages in which the ancients compiled their works. Most of the forms of speech made use of in common conversation, are apt to sink the dignity of a serious style, and to take off from the solemnity of the composition that admits them; nay, those very phrases, that are in themselves highly proper and significant, and were at first, perhaps, studied and elaborate expressions, make but a poor figure in writing, after they are once adopted into common discourse, and sound over-familiar to an ear that is everywhere accustomed to them. They are too much dishonoured by common use, and contract a meanness, by passing so frequently through the mouths of the vulgar. For this reason, we often meet with something of a baseness in the styles of our best English authors, which we cannot be so sensible of in the Latin and Greek writers; because their language is dead, and no more used in our familiar conversations; so that they have now laid aside all their natural homeliness and simplicity, and appear to us in the splendour and formality of strangers. We are not intimately enough acquainted with them, and never met with their expressions but in print, and that too on a serious occasion; and therefore find nothing of that levity or meanness in the ideas they give us, as they might convey into their minds, who used them as their mother-tongue. To consider the Latin poets in this light, Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, and Lucan, in several parts of him, are not a little beholden to antiquity, for the privilege I have here mentioned, who would appear but very plain men without it; as we may the better find, if we take them out of their numbers, and see how naturally they fall into low prose. Claudian and Statius, on the contrary, whilst they endeavour too much to deviate from common and vulgar phrases, clog their verse with unnecessary epithets, and swell their style with forced, unnatural expressions, till they have blown it up into bombast; so that their sense has much ado

1 As they might convey.] The correlative to that is not as, but which.

to struggle through their words. Virgil, and Horace in his Odes, have run between these two extremes, and made their expressions very sublime, but at the same time very natural. This consideration, therefore, least affects them, for, though you take their verse to pieces, and dispose of their words as you please, you still find such glorious metaphors, figures, and epithets, as give it too great a majesty for prose, and look something like the ruin of a noble pile, where you see broken pillars, scattered obelisks, maimed statues, and a magnificence in confusion.

And as we are not much offended with the low idiotisms of a dead language, so neither are we very sensible of any familiar words that are used in it; as we may more particularly observe in the names of persons and places. We find in our English writers, how much the proper name of one of our own countrymen pulls down the language that surrounds it,1 and familiarizeth a whole sentence. For our ears are so often used to it, that we find something vulgar and common in the sound and cant; but2 fancy the pomp and solemnity of style too much humbled and depressed by it. For this reason, the authors of poems and romances, who are not tied up to any particular set of proper names, take the liberty of inventing new ones, or, at least, of choosing such as are not used in their own country; and, by this means, not a little maintain the grandeur and majesty of their language. Now the proper names of a Latin or Greek author have the same effect upon us as those of a romance, because we meet with them nowhere else but in books. Cato, Pompey, and Marcellus, sound as great in our ears, who have none of their families among us, as Agamemnon, Hector, and Achilles; and therefore, though they might flatten an oration of Tully to a Roman reader, they have no such effect upon an English one. What I have here said, may perhaps give us the reason why Virgil, when he mentions the ancestors of three noble Roman families, turns Sergius, Memmius, and Cluentius, which might have degraded his verse too much, into Sergestus, Mnestheus, and Cloanthus, though the three first would have been as high and sonorous to us as the other.

But though the poets could make thus free with the proper

1 Pulls down the language that surrounds it.] Another instance of expression purely Addisonian.

2 But.] It should be-and.

VOL. V.

names of persons, and in that respect enjoyed a privilege beyond the prose writers; they lay both under an equal obligation, as to the names of places: for there is no poetical geography, rivers are the same in prose and verse; and the towns and countries of a romance differ nothing from those of a true history. How oddly, therefore, must the name of a paltry village sound to those who were well acquainted with the meanness of the place; and yet how many such names are to be met with in the catalogues of Homer and Virgil? Many of their words must, therefore, very much shock the ear of a Roman or Greek, especially whilst the poem was new; and appear as meanly to their own countrymen, as the Duke of Buckingham's Putney Pikes and Chelsea Cuirasseers do to an Englishman. But these their catalogues have no such disadvantageous sounds in them to the ear of a modern, who scarce ever hears of the names out of the poet, or knows anything of the places that belong to them. London may sound as well to a foreigner as Troy or Rome; and Islington, perhaps, better than London to them who have no distinct ideas arising from the names. I have here only mentioned the names of men and places; but we may easily carry the observation further, to those of several plants, animals, &c. Thus, where Virgil compares the flight of Mercury to that of a water-fowl, Servius tells us, that he purposely omitted the word Mergus, that he might not debase his style with it; which, though it might have offended the niceness of a Roman ear, would have sounded more tolerably in ours. Scaliger, indeed, ridicules the old scholiast for his note; because, as he observes, the word Mergus is used by the same poet in his Georgics. But the critic should have considered that, in the Georgics, Virgil studied description more than majesty; and therefore might justly admit a low word into that poem, which would have disgraced his Eneid, especially when a god was to be joined with it in the comparison.

As antiquity thus conceals what is low and vulgar in an author, so does it draw a kind of veil over any expression that is strained above nature, and recedes too much from the familiar forms of speech. A violent Grecism, that would startle a Roman at the reading of it, sounds more natural to us, and is less distinguishable from other parts of the style. An obsolete, or a new word, that made a strange appearance

at first to the reader's eye, is now incorporated into the tongue, and grown of a piece with the rest of the language. And as for any bold expressions in a celebrated ancient, we are so far from disliking them, that most readers single out only such passages as are most daring, to commend; and take it for granted, that the style is beautiful and elegant, where they find it hard and unnatural. Thus has time mellowed the works of antiquity, by qualifying, if I may so say, the strength and rawness of their colours, and casting into shades the light that was at first too violent and glaring for the eye to behold with pleasure.

Thus far Bishop Hurd's edition has been followed without variation. The following pieces having, in later years, been ascribed to Addison, on what appears to be sufficient evidence, it has been thought advisable to introduce them here.