and another Virgil may possible arise from those very causes which
produced the first, though it would be impudence to affirm that any
such have yet appeared.

It is manifest that some particular ages have been more happy than
others in the production of great men in all sorts of arts and
sciences, as that of Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and the
rest, for stage-poetry amongst the Greeks; that of Augustus for
heroic, lyric, dramatic, elegiac, and indeed all sorts of poetry in
the persons of Virgil, Horace, Varius, Ovid, and many others,
especially if we take into that century the latter end of the
commonwealth, wherein we find Varro, Lucretius, and Catullus; and at
the same time lived Cicero and Sallust and Caesar. A famous age in
modern times for learning in every kind was that of Lorenzo de
Medici and his son Leo the Tenth, wherein painting was revived, and
poetry flourished, and the Greek language was restored.

Examples in all these are obvious, but what I would infer is this--
that in such an age it is possible some great genius may arise to
equal any of the ancients, abating only for the language; for great
contemporaries whet and cultivate each other, and mutual borrowing
and commerce makes the common riches of learning, as it does of the
civil government.

But suppose that Homer and Virgil were the only of their species,
and that nature was so much worn out in producing them that she is
never able to hear the like again, yet the example only holds in
heroic poetry; in tragedy and satire I offer myself to maintain,
against some of our modern critics, that this age and the last,
particularly in England, have excelled the ancients in both those