please all such readers as are not unqualified for the entertainment
by their affectation of ignorance; and the reason is plain, because
the same paintings of nature which recommend it to the most ordinary
reader will appear beautiful to the most refined.

The old song of "Chevy-Chase" is the favourite ballad of the common
people of England, and Ben Jonson used to say he had rather have
been the author of it than of all his works. Sir Philip Sidney, in
his discourse of Poetry, speaks of it in the following words: "I
never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my
heart more moved than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung by some
blind crowder with no rougher voice than rude style, which being so
evil apparelled in the dust and cobweb of that uncivil age, what
would it work trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?" For my
own part, I am so professed an admirer of this antiquated song, that
I shall give my reader a critique upon it without any further
apology for so doing.

The greatest modern critics have laid it down as a rule that an
heroic poem should be founded upon some important precept of
morality adapted to the constitution of the country in which the
poet writes. Homer and Virgil have formed their plans in this view.
As Greece was a collection of many governments, who suffered very
much among themselves, and gave the Persian emperor, who was their
common enemy, many advantages over them by their mutual jealousies
and animosities, Homer, in order to establish among them an union
which was so necessary for their safety, grounds his poem upon the
discords of the several Grecian princes who were engaged in a
confederacy against an Asiatic prince, and the several advantages
which the enemy gained by such discords. At the time the poem we