Page:Virgil's Pastorals, Georgics and Aeneis - Dryden (1709) - volume 1.pdf/37

 happy turn of Verse, in which he much surpasses all the Latins, and in a less advantageous Language, equals even Homer himself. He propos'd to use his Talent in Poetry, only for Scaffolding to Build a convenient Fortune, that he might Prosecute with less interruption, those Nobler Studies to which his elevated Genius led him, and which he describes in these admirable Lines. Me verò primùm dulces ante omnia Musæ Quarum sacra fero ingenti perculsus amore, Accipiant, cælìq vias, & sidera monstrent, Defectus Solis varios, Lunæq; labores: Ʋnde tremor terris, &c. But the current of that Martial Age, by some strange Antiperistasis drove so violently towards Poetry, that he was at last carried down with the stream. For not only the Young Nobility, but Octavius, and Pollio, Cicero in his Old Age, Julius Cæsar, and the Stoical Brutus, a little before, would needs be tampering with the Muses; the two latter had taken great