CANTO THE FIFTH.
When amatory poets sing their loves In liquid lines mellifluously bland, And pair their rhymes as Venus yokes her doves, They little think what mischief is in hand ; The greater their success the worse it proves, As Ovid's verse may give to understand ; Even Petrarch's self, if judged with due severity, Is the Platonic pimp of all posterity. II. I therefore do denounce all amorous writing. Except in such a way as not to attract ; Plain — simple — short, and by no means inviting, But with a moral to each error tacked. Formed rather for instructing than delighting. And with all passions in their turn attacked ; Now, if my Pegasus should not be shod ill, This poem will become a moral model. III. The European with the Asian shore Sprinkled with palaces — the Ocean stream ^ . [Canto V. was begun at Ravenna, October the i6th, and finished November the 20th, 1820. It was published August 8, 1821, together with Cantos III. and IV.] . This expression of Homer has been much criticized. It hardly answers to our Atlantic ideas of the ocean, but is sufficiently applicable to the Hellespont, and the Bosphorus, with the ^gean intersected with islands.
[Vide Iliad, xiv. 245, etc. Homer's "ocean-stream" was not the