junior to this of Chalcedon: Linus of Thebes was the son of the poet Eumolpus, and imparted to Greece the knowledge of the globes: he also before the time of Hesiod composed a poem, in which he gives the genealogy of the deities; all we know respecting it is that it differs in some particulars from Hesiod's Theogony: he paid dearly for the honour of being Hercules's preceptor, for that deified hero put Linus to death; though he gave the genealogy of the heathen gods, he is supposed to have taught a sublimer doctrine of the unity of the Supreme Being.

Of the name of Orpheus grammarians reckon no fewer than five epic poets; their histories are involved in fable, and their distinctions uncertain and obscure. The Thracian Orpheus, who is the elder of the name, is said to have been the disciple of Linus, and to have lived before the Trojan war eleven ages: he was a prophet as well as a poet, and instituted many ceremonies in the Pagan theològy; he delivered precepts in verse relative to the modes of initiation: the mysterious rites of Ceres and Bacchus are supposed to have originated with him, but as it is pretty clear that these rites were Egyptian, they might be introduced, but not invented, by Orpheus.

The second Orpheus was sirnamed Ciconæus, or Arcas, and was also of Thracian extraction; he is said to have flourished two generations before the siege of Troy; he also was an heroic poet, and wrote fables and hymns addressed to the deities. Orpheus Odrysius and Orpheus Camarinæus were epic poets, but he, who was sirnamed Crotoniates, was contemporary with Pisistratus, and lived in great favour and familiarity at the Athenian court; he is said to have written the Argonautics; the

hymns and the poems hands.

'De Lapidibus' now in our

The ancients, in the true spirit of fable, ascribed miraculous powers to the harmony of Orpheus's lyre, and almost all the Roman poets have echoed his praises in the same fanciful strain. Ovid gives us a list of forest trees that danced to his lyre, as long as a gardener's calendar: (Metam. fab. 2. lib. 10.) Seneca, in his Hercules Furens' gives power over woods, rivers, rocks, wild beasts, and infernal spirits (Herc. Fur. 569.) Horace adds to these the winds, and Manilius places his lyre amongst the constellations, having enumerated all her supernatural properties in the following short but comprehensive and nervous description:

him

At lyra diductis per cælum cornibus inter

Sidera conspicitur, quâ quondam cerperat Orpheus
Omne quod attigerat cantu; manesque per ipsos
Fecit iter, domuitque infernas carmine leges.
Huic similis honos, similisque potentia causæ :
Tunc silvas et saxa trahens, nunc sidera ducit,
Et rapit immensum mundi revolubilis orbem.

MANIL.

Of the name of Musæus there were also several poets; the elder, or Athenian Musæus, son of Antiphemus, was the scholar of Orpheus. The poetry of these ancient bards was chiefly addressed to the services of religion; their hymns were chaunted as parts of divine worship, and the power of divination was ascribed to them, as the natural tribute of a barbarous multitude to men of superior and enlightened talents: the knowledge of simples and their use in healing diseases or wounds, was amongst the arts by which these early benefactors to mankind attracted the reverence of the vulgar, and Musæus is said to have composed a poem on the cure

of diseases; this Museus was the father of Eumolpus, and it will be found by them, who have curiosity to search into the records of these ancient bards, that the great prerogatives of prophet and poet descended regularly through certain families after the manner of the Eastern and Jewish castes. Eumolpus, who was of this family, besides the hymns and verses he composed upon the mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus, possessed the art of divination by inspection of the human palm; an art of Egyptian origin.

Thamyris, the son of Philamon, is reckoned amongst the epic poets who flourished before the time of Homer: he composed a long poem, consisting of nearly three thousand lines, entitled The Theology; but as this could not be denominated an epic poem, and as no record remains of any composition of his in that branch of poetry, it is a great doubt whether it is not owing to the fictions of the early grammarians, who were industrious to detract from the originality of Homer's epic, that Thamyris and so many others are enumerated under that description of poets antecedent to Homer; for some accounts make Thamyris the eighth epic poet prior to Homer, an authority to which no credit seems due.

Marsyas and Olympus are supposed to have lived in the time of the Argonautic expedition, but they, as well as Amphion, are more celebrated for their musical talents and inventions, than for their skill in poetry of Demodocus, Phemius, and Asbolus the Centaur, supposed to have been poets antecedent to Homer, I find no particulars.

The exact time in which Hesiod lived, as referring to the age of Homer, remains a point of controversy in the chronology of the poets: they, who

give credit to the verses, he is by some supposed to
have written in competition with Homer, must
place him as his contemporary; the best authorities
fix him in a period somewhat antecedent to Ho-
mer's; Aulus Gellius inclines to the opinion of
Hesiod being posterior to Homer, but Aristopha-
nes, in his comedy of the Frogs, places Homer in
erder of time after Hesiod: he introduces the
poet Eschylus reciting the praises of Orpheus in
the first place, secondly of Musæus, thirdly of He-
siod, and lastly of Homer, which order of placing
them the old scholiast interprets to apply to the
times in which they lived: the passage is as follows:
The holy rites of worship Orpheus taught,
And warn'd me to abstain from human blood:
In divination and the healing arts

Musæus was my master: Hesiod gave
The useful lesson how to till the earth.

And mark'd the seasons when to sow the grain,
And when to reap; but Homer, bard divine!
Gods! to what height he soars, whilst he arrays
The warrior bright in arms, directs the fight,
And with heroic virtue fires the soul!

ARISTOPH. FROGS.

The bards of the Orphean family and others of high antiquity employed their talents in composing hymns and offices of devotion; and it is natural that such should be the first use and application of the powers of poetry; the reason is good on both sides why there should in all times have subsisted an alliance between poetry and prayer. Metre aids and is adapted to the memory; it accords to music, and is the vehicle of enthusiasm; it makes the moral doctrines of religion more sublime, and the mysterious ones more profound; it can render truth more awful, and superstition more imposing: if the eastern nations have set apart a language for

their priests, and dedicated it as sacred to the purposes of prayer, we may well believe that the ancient Heathen bards, who were chiefly Asiatic Greeks, performed religious rites and ceremonies in metre, with accompaniments of music, to which they were devoted in the extreme: the hymns of David and the patriarchal prophecies were in metre, and speak for themselves; we have the same authority for knowing that the Chaldean worship was accompanied with music; the fact does not need illustration; the divinations of Musæus and the hymns of Orpheus were of the same character; initiations were performed, oracles were delivered, and even laws promulgated in verse: the influence of poetry over the human heart is coeval with it, not limited by time or country, but universal to the world in all its parts and all its periods; it is the language of rapture, springs with invention, and flows with devotion; the enthusiast in love or glory breaks forth into it spontaneously, and the voice of lamentation, attuned by sensibility, falls naturally into numbers.

When I am speaking of the Oracular Poets, or Diviners, it is not possible to pass over the Sibyls, the most extraordinary in this order of bards; their oracles have been agitated by the learned in all ages, and received with the utmost veneration and respect by the Greeks first, and afterwards by the Romans: Heathen writers and some of the first and most respectable fathers of the Christian Church refer to them without hesitation, and the fact of their existence rests upon such strength of testimony, as seems to amount to historical demonstration and universal assent. It appears that the Delphic and Erythrean Sibyls, were the oldest of the name, lived before the Trojan war: the verses of the Ery