RETIREMENT OF AUTHORS.

Few persons know how to retreat in time, or can say with Horace:

Est mihi purgatam crebro qui personet aurem:
Solve senescentem maturè sanus equum, ne
Peccet ad extremus ridendus et ilia ducat.

Hor. Epist. 1, lib. i.

The voice of reason cries with piercing force,
Loose from the rapid car yon aged horse,
Lest in the race divided, left behind,
Jaded he drag his limbs, and burst his wind.

Francis.

Poets and orators ought to be most careful of withdrawing from their business at a proper time, because they stand most in need of the warmth of imagination; yet it too frequently happens that they persist in their career till the lowest decline of age. They think the public is obliged to drink the very dregs of their pretended nectar. But if formerly the legislators limited the time wherein people might marry, (for they prohibited it to women of fifty and men of sixty years of age) and if they supposed that, after a certain age, it was time to leave off thinking of procreation, either because of the extinction, or the weakness of the faculties, every author ought, for the same reason, to set bounds to himself in the production of books, which is a kind of generation, for which every age is by no means proper. Poets should leave Apollo’s service betimes. I add, that if they feel the return of any poetical fit, they should take it for a temptation of an evil genius, and put up the same prayer to the goddesses of Parnassus that one of their brethren addressed to the Goddess of Love:

. . . parce, precor, precor,
Mon sum qualis eram bonæ
Sub regno Cynaræ. Desine, dulcium
Mater sæva Cupidinum,
Circa lustra decern flectere mollibus
Jam durum imperiis: abi
Quò blandæ juvenum te revocant preces.

Hor. Od. 1, lib. 4, ver. 2.

O spare for pity, Venus, spare!
I am not what I was
In lovely Cynara’s easy reign,
When heat warm'd every vein,
And manly beauty fill’d my face.
Cease, queen of soft desires,
To bend my mind grown stiff with age,
Nor fifty years engage
To crackle in thy wanton fires;
But youth and beauty hear.

Creech.

The service of the Musés is in many things like the service of the ladies; it is better to leave it too soon than too late. It is said that certain kings ordered some of their domestics to tell them every day, “remember such a business.” If it be allowable to compare little things with great ones, old poets should have somebody to tell them every morning, “Remember your age.” Horace boasts of having had such advice given him.—Arts. Afer and D’Auraz·