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things, they are very well ascertained.Mr. W.

It would be difficult too to settle what should be done as to the etymologies of words. If given to all, it would be often very trifling and very troublesome; and if given to none, we should miss some very sensible originals of words.-The same,

Abbe Pluche's founding his whole scheme on the original significations of names, would not be of any great weight, even though he should not have falsified their significations. The original languages were very narrow in words, so that in them the same word usually stands for forty different things. Hence it is that one can prove every thing to have been derived from terms of agriculture; another from terms of navigation; a third from terms of war; and a fourth from the names of the patriarchs. Pluche, it is true, has a peculiar simplicity in his scheme; but it should be considered that simplicity may serve falsehood as truth: though it is always beautiful, it is sometimes fallacious.-The same.

There is scarce any work of mine in which the versification was more laboured than my pastorals.-Mr. Pope. [The last his own favourite of them all.]

Though Virgil in his pastorals has sometimes six or eight lines together that are lyric, I have been so scrupulous as scarce ever to admit above two together, even in the Messiah.-The same.

There is a sweetness that is the distinguishing character of pastoral versification. The fourth and fifth syllables, and the last but two, are chiefly to be minded; and one must tune each line over in one's head, to try whether they go right or not.-Mr. Pope.

"Did you ever learn any thing of music?" Never; but I had naturally a very good ear, and have often judged right of the best compositions in music by the force of that. -The same.

I had once a thought of completing my ethic work in four books. - The same. / The first, you know, is on the nature of man ; the second would have been on

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knowledge and its limits: here would have come in an essay on education, part of which I have inserted in the Dunciad.—

The same.

The third was to have treated of government, both ecclesiastical and civil; and this was what chiefly stopped my going on: I could not have said what I would have said, without provoking every church on the face of the earth; and I did not care for living always in boiling water. This part would come into my Brutus, which is all planned already, and even some of the most material speeches writ in prose. The fourth 4 would have been on morality, in eight or nine of the most concerning branches of it; four of which would have been the two extremes to each of the cardinal virtues.The same.

I have followed that (the significance of the numbers, and the adapting them to the sense) much more even than Dryden, and much oftener than any one minds it; particularly in the translation of Homer, when it was not necessary to do so, and in the

Dunciad often; and indeed in all my poems.-Mr. Pope.

The great rule of verse is to be musical this other is only a secondary consideration, and should not jar too much with the former. I remember two lines I wrote when I was a boy, that were very faulty this way. It was on something that I was to describe as passing away as quick as thought:

"So swift, this moment here, the next 'tis gone, "So imperceptible the motion."

The same.
*

"I did not use to like a verse in the Iliad, perhaps from its having a liquid in almost every word of it." Ay, but that does not make it run on like a river verse, it only weakens it: 'tis as the thing described, nerveless and yet stiff.-The same.

On somebody's coming to see him on his illness, and saying they heard he was going to put his faith in a new physician, he said "no; I have not laid aside my old physician, and given myself up to a new

*" He lies a lifeless load along the land."

one, any more than I have renounced the errors of our church, and taken up with those of yours."—The same.

"Here am I, like Socrates, distributing my morality among my friends, just as I am dying." Mr. Pope [on sending about some of his ethic epistles as presents, about three weeks before we lost him.]

"I really had that thought several times when I was last with you, and was apt now and then to look upon myself like Phædo." That might be, but you must not expect me to say any thing like Socrates at present. The same.

One of the things that I have always most wondered at is, that there should be any such thing as human vanity. If I had any, I had enough to mortify it a few days ago, for I lost my mind for a whole day.— The same. [This was on the 10th of May, and the day he spoke of was the Sunday before, May 6th.]

A day or two after he complained of that odd phenomenon (as he called it), of seeing

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