Page:Virgil's Pastorals, Georgics and Aeneis - Dryden (1709) - volume 1.pdf/211

Rh ''Rule and Measure of all your Actions. The World knows this, without my telling: Yet Poets have a right of Recording it to all Posterity.''

Epaminondas, Lucullus, and the two first Cæsars, ''were not esteem'd the worse Commanders, for having made Philosophy, and the Liberal Arts their Study. Cicero might have been their Equal, but that he wanted Courage. To have both these Vertues, and to have improv'd them both, with a softness of Manners, and a sweetness of Conversation, few of our Nobility can fill that Character: One there is, and so conspicuous by his own light, that he needs not''

''To be Nobly Born, and of an Ancient Family, is in the extreams of Fortune, either good or bad; for Virtue and Descent are no Inheritance. A long Series of Ancestours shews the Native with great advantage at the first; but if he any way degenerate from his Line, the least Spot is visible on Ermine. But to preserve this whiteness in its Original Purity, you, my Lord, have, like that Ermine, forsaken the common Track of Business,''