these views, I cannot but commend your wise resolution to withdraw so early from other unprofitable and severe studies, and betake yourself to that, which, if you have good luck, will advance your fortune, and make you an ornament to your friends and your country. It may be your justification, and farther encouragement, to consider, that history, ancient or modern, cannot furnish you an instance of one person, eminent in any station, who was not in some measure versed in poetry, or at least a well-wisher to the professors of it; neither would I despair to prove, if legally called thereto, that it is impossible to be a good soldier, divine, or lawyer, or even so much as an eminent bellman, or balladsinger, without some taste of poetry, and a competent skill in versification: but I say the less of this, because the renowned sir P. Sidney has exhausted the subject before me, in his defence of poesie, on which I shall make no other remark but this, that he argues there as if he really believed himself.
For my own part, having never made one verse since I was at school, where I suffered too much for my blunders in poetry to have any love to it ever since, I am not able, from any experience of my own, to give you those instructions you desire; neither will I declare (for I love to conceal my pas-
dial so long, that it has no effect upon me; but you, madam, are in your honeymoon of poetry; you have seen only the smiles, and enjoyed the caresses, of Apollo. Nothing is so pleasant to a muse as the first children of the imagination; but, when once she comes to find it mere conjugal duty, and the care of her numerous progeny daily grows upon her, it is all a sour tax for past pleasure. I find by experience, that his own fiddle is no great pleasure to a common fiddler, after once the first good conceit of himself is lost." Pope, Letters to a Lady, p. 52.
