I cannot but add one remark on this occasion,--that the French verse is oftentimes not so much as rhyme, in the lowest sense; for the childish repetition of the same note cannot be called music. Such instances are infinite, as in the forecited poem:
épris trophée caché mépris Orphée cherché.
M. Boileau himself has a great deal of this #monotonia#, not by his own neglect, but purely by the faultiness and poverty of the French tongue. M. Fontenelle at last goes into the excessive paradoxes of M. Perrault, and boasts of the vast number of their excellent songs, preferring them to the Greek and Latin. But an ancient writer, of as good credit, has assured us, that seven lives would hardly suffice to read over the Greek odes; but a few weeks would be sufficient, if a man were so very idle as to read over all the French. In the mean time, I should be very glad to see a catalogue of but fifty of theirs with
Exact propriety of word and thought.[294]
Notwithstanding all the high encomiums and mutual gratulations which they give one another, (for I am far from censuring the whole of that illustrious society, to which the learned world is much obliged,) after all those golden dreams at the Louvre, that their pieces will be as much valued, ten or twelve ages hence, as the ancient Greek or Roman, I can no more get it into my head that they will last so long, than I could believe the learned Dr H----k [of the Royal Society,] if he should pretend to show me a butterfly, that had lived a thousand winters.
When M. Fontenelle wrote his Eclogues, he was so far from equalling Virgil, or Theocritus, that he had some pains to take before he could understand in what the principal beauty and graces of their writings do consist.
[288] There is a great deal of cant in this; there was just the same distinction in manners and knowledge between the clowns of Mantua and the courtiers of Augustus, as there is between persons of the same rank in modern times.
[289] Hunting was as much an exercise of the Roman youths as of our own; and this might be easily proved from Virgil, were it not a well known fact. It was the sport with which Dido entertained the Trojans; and the wish of Ascanius upon the occasion, was worthy of a Frank, or any other German.