We read that Virgil used to make fifty or sixty verses in a morning, and
afterwards reduce them to ten. This was an unthrifty vanity, and argues
him as well ignorant in the husbandry of his own poetry as Seneca says
he was in that of a farm; for, in plain English, it was no better than
bringing a noble to nine-pence. And as such courses brought the prodigal
son to eat with hogs, so they did him to feed with horses, which were
not much better company, and may teach us to avoid doing the like. For
certainly it is more noble to take four or five grains of sense, and,
like a gold-beater, hammer them into so many leaves as will fill a whole
book, than to write nothing but epitomes, which many wise men believe
will be the bane and calamity of learning. When he writes he commonly
steers the sense of his lines by the rhyme that is at the end of them,
as butchers do calves by the tail. For when he has made one line, which
is easy enough, and has found out some sturdy hard word that will but
rhyme, he will hammer the sense upon it, like a piece of hot iron upon
an anvil, into what form he pleases.
There is no art in the world so rich in terms as poetry; a whole
dictionary is scarce able to contain them, for there is hardly a pond, a
sheep-walk, or a gravel-pit in all Greece but the ancient name of it is
become a term of art in poetry. By this means small poets have such a
stock of able hard words lying by them, as dryads, hamadryads, Aonides,
fauni, nymphae, sylvani, &c.
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