Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 4.djvu/229

Rh things that make wise men serious, he confounds the living man with the dead:

When a man is once buried, the question, under what he is buried, is easily decided. He forgot that though he wrote the epitaph in a state of uncertainty, yet it could not be laid over him till his grave was made. Such is the folly of wit when it is ill employed.

The world has but little new; even this wretchedness seems to have been borrowed from the following tuneless Lines:

Surely Ariosto did not venture to expect that his trifle would have ever had such an illustrious imitator.

Vol. IV.