the learned, both Heathen and Christian, corro-frequent recitation fixed upon his memory, and borates this opinion: but whether the copy now as he warmed with the advancing composition, in our hand does or does not contain any genuine lines of these Sibylls, is a question I will not now take on myself to discuss; all that need be said on this point at present is, that there are some passages, whose antiquity is established by the references and quotations of the old Heathen writers, and against which no objections can be drawn from the internal characters and marks of the text.

NUMBER CXXII.

he sallied forth in search of hearers, chanting his verses in the assemblies and cities that received him; his fancy working out those won derful examples of the sublime, as he took his solitary migrations from place to place: when he made his passages by sea, and committed himself to the terrors of the ocean, the grandest scene in nature came under his view, and his plastic fancy seizing every object that accorded to its purposes, melted and compounded it into the mass and matter of the work on which his brain was labouring: thus with nature in his eye, inspiration at his heart, and contemplation ever active, secured by solitude against external interruption, and undisturbed by worldly cares and concerns from within, the wandering bard

THE first effusions of poetry having been ad-performed what time has never equalled, and dressed to prayer and worship, to the mysteries what to all posterity will remain the standard and genealogies of the deities, to religious rites, of perfection.-Hunc nemo in magnis sublimitate, sacrifices, and initiations, and to the awful pro-in parvis proprietate, superaverit: idem latus ac mulgation of oracles by enthusiastic Sibylls, pressus, jucundus et gravis, tum copia tum brevitate chanting forth to the astonished multitude their mirabilis; nec poeticâ modo sed oratoriâ virtute tremendous denunciations, the time was now in eminentissimus. [Quint. lib. x.] "Him no one approach, when that portion of divine inspira-ever excelled in sublimity on great topics, in tion, which seems to be the moving spring of poetry, should branch into a new department.

propriety on small ones: whether diffused or compressed, gay or grave, whether for his abundance or his brevity, he is equally to be admired, nor is he supereminent for poetical talents only, but for oratorical also."

There is no doubt but Homer composed other poems besides his Iliad and Odyssey: Aristotle in his Poetics decidedly ascribes the Margites to Homer; but as to the Ilias Minor, and Cypriacs, though it is evident these poems were in his hands, yet he seems ignorant of their author; the passage I allude to will be found in the twenty-third chapter of his Poetics; he is com

When the human genius was more matured and better qualified by judgment and experience, and the thoughts, instead of being hurried along by the furious impulse of a heated fancy, began to take into sober contemplation the worldly actions of men, and the revolutions and changes of human events, operating upon society, the poet began to prepare himself by forethought and arrangement of ideas for the future purposes of composition: it became his first business to contrive a plan and groundwork for the structure of his poem: he saw that it must have uni-paring these two poems with the Iliad and formity, simplicity, and order, a beginning, a middle, and an end; that the main object must be interesting and important, that the incidents and accessary part must hinge upon that object, and not wander from the central idea, on which the whole ought to rest: that a subject corres. ponding thereto, when elevated by language, superior to the phrase and dialogue of the vulgar, would constitute a work more orderly and better constructed than what arose from the sudden and abrupt effusions of unpremeditated verse.

In this manner Homer, the great poet of antiquity, and the father and founder, as I must think, of epic poetry, revolving in his capacious mind, the magnificent events of the Grecian association for the destruction of Troy, then fresh in the tradition, if not in the memories of his contemporaries, planned the great design of his immortal Iliad. With this plan arranged and settled in his thoughts beforehand, he began to give a loose to the force and powers of his imagination in strains and rhapsodies, which by

Odyssey, as furnishing subjects for the drama, and observes that the stage could not properly draw above one, or at most two plots for tragedy from the Iliad and Odyssey respectively, whereas many might be taken from the Cypriacs, and he enumerates to the amount of ten, which might be found in the Ilias Minor: it is evident, by the context, that he does not think either of these poems were composed by Homer, and no less evident that he does not know to whom they are to be ascribed; their high antiquity therefore is the only point which this celebrated critic has put out of doubt.

The Ilias Minor appears to have been a poem, which includes the taking of Troy and the return of the Greeks the incidents of the Æneid, as far as they refer to the Trojan story, seem to have been taken from this poem, and in particular the episode of Sinon, which is amongst the dramatic subjects mentioned by Aristotle: the controversy between Ajax and Ulysses for the armour of Achilles was copied by Ovid from the

place in which the poem was written; and when we have located Homer in Ionia, whilst he was employed in writing his poem, we have one point of doubt at least cleared up in his history to our conviction, and his accuracy in one branch of knowledge vindicated from the cavils of critics.

same poem. If this work is not to be given to | argument must surely be satisfactory as to the Homer, we must believe it was written since the Iliad, from the evidence of its title; but if the author's name was lost in Aristotle's time, his antiquity is probably little short of Homer's: some scholiasts have given this poem to Lesches, but when Lesches lived, and of what country he was, I find no account.

Having established this point, viz. that Homer was an Asiatic Greek, inhabiting the seacoast, or an island on the coast of Ionia, and having vindicated his accuracy in geographical knowledge, the ingenious author of the essay proceeds to show, by way of corollary from his proposition thus demonstrated, that Homer must have been a great traveller: that geographical knowledge was in those days no

The Cypriacs are supposed to contain the love-adventures of the Trojan ladies during the siege, and probably was a poem of fiction. He rodotus has an observation in his second book upon a passage in this poem, in which Paris is said to have brought Helen from Sparta to Troy in the space of three days, whereas Homer says they were long driven about in their voyage from place to place; from this want of corres-otherwise to be acquired; that he appears to pondence in a fact of such consequence, HerodoLus concludes upon fair grounds of criticism that Homer was not author of the Cypriacs, though Pindar ascribes it to him: some give the Cypriacs to Hegesias of Salamis, others to Stasinus, a poet of Cyprus, and by some Homer is said to have given this poem, written by himself, by way of portion to his daughter, married to Stasinus: this daughter of Homer was called Arsephone, and his sons Theriphon and Theolaus: Nævius translated the Cypriacs into La-great was the authority of Homer's original tin verse: many more poems are ascribed to Homer, which would be tedious to particularize, they are enumerated by Suidas, whom the reader, if his curiosity so inclines him, may readily consult.

have been thoroughly conversant in the arts of building and navigating ships, as then understood and practised; and that his map of Greece, which both Strabo, Apollodorus the Athenian, Menogenes and Demetrius of Scepsis illustrated in so diffusive a manner, puts it out of doubt, that he must have visited the several countries, and surveyed them with attention, before he could have laid them down with such geographical accuracy: certain it is, that so

chart, that it was a law in some cities that the youth should learn it by heart; that Solon appealed to it for establishing the right of Athens to Salamis in preference to the claims of the Megarensians; and that territorial property and dominion were in several instances decided by referring to this Homeric chart: another evidence of Homer's travels he derives from his lively delineations of national character, which he observes are marked with such precision, and supported throughout with such consistency, as not to allow us to think that he could have acquired this knowledge of mankind from any other source but his own observations.

It is more than probable Homer did not commit his poems to writing; it is mere conjecture whether that invention was actually in existence at the time he lived; there is nothing in his works that favours this conjecture, and in such a case

As to any other information personally respecting this great poet, it has been given to the world so ably by the late Mr. Wood, in his essay on the original Genius and Writings of Homer, that I can add nothing on the occasion, except the humble recommendation of my judgment in its favour. The internal evidence which this essayist adduces to fix the birth place and early residence of his poet in Ionia, is both learnedly collected and satisfactorily applied; he observes that Homer, in his general manner of describing the geography of countries, speaks of them as more or less distant in proportion to their bearing from Ionia: he describes Zephyrus as a rude and boisterous wind, blow-silence is something more than negative: the ing from Thrace: this circumstance has been urged against Homer as a proof of his error in geography, and the soft and gentle quality of Zephyrus, so often celebrated by poets in all times, is quoted in aid of the charge; but the sagacity and local knowledge of Mr. Wood divert the accusation, and turn it into an argument for ascertaining the spot of Homer's nativity and residence, by reminding us, that when the poet describes the wind blowing from he Thracian mountains upon the Ægean sea, it must of course be a West wind in respect to Ionia, from which circumstance he draws his consequence that Homer was an Ionian. This

retention of such compositions is certainly an
astonishing effort of the human memory, but
instances are not wanting of the like nature in
early and uncivilized states, and the memory is
capable of being expanded by habit and exercise
to an extraordinary and almost unlimited com-
pass,
Unwritten compositions were always
in verse: and metre was certainly used in aid
of memory. It must not however be taken for
a consequence that writing first came into use
when Pherecydes and Cadmus first composed
in prose, as some have imagined; for it un-
doubtedly obtained before their time, and was
probably brought into Greece from Phoenicia.

The engraving of the laws of Draco is supposed to have been the first application of that art; but it was a work of labour, and required the tool of the artist, rather than the hand of the penman. Thales and Pythagoras left us no writings behind them, though they spread their learning over Greece, and from their schools peopled it with philosophers. The unwritten drama was long in existence before any compositions of that sort were committed to writing. Solon's laws were engraved in wood or stone, and there appears to have been but one table of them. Of Lycurgus' regulations there was no written record; the mind of the judge was the depository of the law. Draco published his laws in Olymp. xxxix; Pisistratus died in Olymp. lxiii; a century had nearly passed between the publication of these laws and the first institution of a public library at Athens; great advances no doubt were made within that period in the art of writing: nevertheless it was by no means an operation of facility in Pisistratu time, and his compilation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey was a work of vast labour and of royal expense: the book remained at Athens as a princely monument of his munificence and love of letters; his library was resorted to by all men of science in Greece, but copies of the work were not circulated till the time of the Ptolemies; even Alexander of Macedon, when he had possessed himself of a complete copy of his favourite poet, locked it up in the rich chest of which he had despoiled King Darius, as the most worthy case in which he could enclose so inestimable a treasure; when a copy of Homer was considered by a prince as a possession so rare, it cannot be supposed his written works undertaking, and the translator entered upon it were in many hands: as for the detached rhap- with a candid confession that he was-" utterly sodies which Lycurgus in more early times incapable of doing justice to Homer:" he also brought with him out of Asia, they must have says "That if Mr. Dryden had translated the been exceeding imperfect, though it is to be pre-whole work, he would no more have attempted sumed they were in writing.

Conjecture, and even fiction, have been enviously set to work by grammarians and others within the Christian era to found a charge of plagiarism against Homer and to dispute his title to originality. We are told that Corinnus, who was a scholar of Palamedes, inventor of the Doric letters, composed a poem called the Iliad, whilst Troy was standing, in which he celebrates the war of Dardanus against the Paphlagonians, and that Homer formed himself upon his model, closely copying him: it is asserted by others, that he availed himself of the poems of Dictys the Cretan, who was of the family of Idomeneus, and lived in the time of the Trojan war: but these fables are still less probable than the story of his contest with Hesiod, and of the prize being decreed against him. Orpheus, Musæus, Eumolpus and Thamyris, all of Thrace; Marsyas, Olympus, and Midas, all of the Ionian side of the Meander, were poets antecedent to Homer; so were Amphion, Demodocus, Philammon, Phemius, Aristæus author of the Arimaspia, Isatides, Drymon, Asbolus the Centaur, Eumicles the Cyprian, Horus of Samos, Prosnautis of Athens, and the celebrated Sibyll.

NUMBER CXXIII.

The five poets, who are generally styled the masters of epic poetry, are Homer, Antimachus the Colophonian, Panyasis of Halicarnassus, Pisander of Camirus, and Hesiod of Cumæ ; and all these were natives of the Asiatic coast.

Before I cease speaking of Homer, I cannot excuse myself from saying something on the subject of Mr. Pope's translation, which will for ever remain a monument of his excellence in the art of versification: it was an arduous

Homer after him than Virgil, his version of whom (notwithstanding some human errors) is the most noble and spirited translation he knows in any language." This is a declaration, that reflects as much honour on Mr. Pope, as it does on Mr. Dryden. Great as his difficulties were, he has nevertheless executed the work in such a manner as to leave stronger reasons why no man should attempt a like translation of Homer after him, than there were why he should not have undertaken it after Mr. Dryden. One thing above all surprises me in the execution of it, which is, "The Catalogue of the Ships; a

FROM the scarcity of transcribers in the time of Pisistratus, and the difficulties of collecting and compiling poems, which existed only in the memories of the rhapsodists, we are led to consider the institution of the Athenian Library, as a most noble and important work; at the same time, when we reflect how many compo-difficulty that I should else have thought insursitions of the earliest poets depended on the fidelity of memory, we cease to wonder that we have so many more records of names than of works. Many poets are enumerated antecedent to the time of Homer; some of these have been already mentioned, and very few indeed of their fragments are now in existence.

mountable in rhyme; this however he has accomplished in the smoothest metre, and a very curious poem it is: no further attempt therefore remained to be made upon Homer, but of a translation in blank verse or in literal prose; a contemporary of eminence in the republic of letters has lately given a prose translation