ABSTRACT
Extracts from (a) a letter from a clerical poet, Luke Milbourne (1649-1720), to Dryden’s bookseller Tonson (Malone, Prose Works of Dryden, 1800,1. i. 315-17); and (b) Milbourne’s Notes on Dryden’s Virgil. In a Letter to a Friend (1698; Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1903), ed. G. B. Hill, i. 450-451). In 1688 Milbourne had published a version of Aeneid i, ‘with a design to go through the poem. It was the misfortune of that first attempt to appear just about the time of the late Revolution, when few had leisure to mind such books’ (Gentleman’s Journal, August 1692). His outrages against Dryden’s translation of Virgil (1697) ‘seem to be the ebullitions of a mind agitated by stronger resentment than bad poetry can excite, and previously resolved not to be pleased’ (Johnson). A little of Milbourne is more than enough.
