THE TEMPLE OF FAME. 89
Hither, they cry’d, direft your eyes, and fee 38aThe men of pleafnre, drefs, and gallantry;
Onrs is the place at banquets, balls, and plays,Sprightly our nights, polite are all our days; ,Courts we frequent, where ’tis our pleahng careTo pay due vifits, and addrefs the fair: 385
In fa£l, ’tis true, no ilymph we could perfuade,
But dill in fancy vanquifh’d ev’ry maid;
Of unknown DnchciTes lend tales we tell,
Yet, would the world believe us, all w T ere well.The joy let others have, and we the name, 3goAnd what we want in pleafure, grant in fame.
NOTES.
But this judicious remark is, I apprehend, confined to ethic andpreceptive kinds of writing, which iland in need of being enlivenedwith lighter image* and fportive thought*, and where ftri&ures oncommon life may more gracefully be ioferted. But, in the higherkinds of poefy, they appear as unnatiiraland out of place, as one ofthe burlefquc fccnes of Heemfkirlc would do in a foie mu landfcapoofPoufiin. When 1 fee fuch a line as, j
And at each blaft a Lady’s honour dies,”—in the temple of Fame. I lament a* much to find it placed there,as to fee fhops, aud fhe*it, and cottages, ercSed among the ruinsof DiocUfian’s baths.
On the revival of literatue, the fiift writers feemed not to haveobferved any felediooin their thought* and images. Dante , Petrarch ,Boccace . Ariofto, make very fudden tranfitioni from the fublime tothe ridiculous Chaucer , in his Temple of Mars, amougft manypathetic pi&ures, has brought in a ftrange line :
The coke is fealded for all his long ladell,"
Vf.r. 417.
No writer has more religiously obferved the decorum here recom*mended than Virgil .