HOMER.

We have but little to offer respecting the genius of a man who has furnished matter for so many dissertations, and so many volumes. All that appears certain is, that one of the oldest poets is still esteemed the most dignified and the most admirable. Epic poetry is the most difficult production of the human mind, and the Iliad is the finest of epic poems.

We are ignorant of the epoch, or the place, which gave birth to Homer; it is only presumed that he lived a little time after the siege of Troy, and that he then became informed of the principal occurrences of the warriors who there distinguished themselves. This has given him an advantage over those who simply delineate the exploits and the character of heroes, of which the recollection is only preserved by feeble tradition. The conception of the Iliad indicates an imagination, lively, fertile, and comprehensive; the delineation of the characters, and their various achieveinents, discovers an observer replete with genius; and the fictions, which embellish the poem, are the happy efforts of an imagination was rich as it is brilliant. Certain critics, without due reflection, have reproached him for the coarseness of the manner in which he describes the asperity and the savage rudeness of his heroes. Are they desirous that he should have given to the companions of Achilles, of Agamemnon, and of Ulysses, the languageof the courtiers of Louis XIV.?

The Odyssey has neither the fire nor the majesty of the Iliad; it announces the poet in his decline; but it is still the vigorous old age of Homer: it is, as Longinus observes, the setting sun, which has not the glow of his meridian splendour, but which possesses the same grandeur. We do not find in this latter work that dramatic form which gives so much motion, and so much interest, to the Iliad; the poet, in the Odyssey, abandons himself to the pleasure of relating; but his genius is still observ able in many pleasing episodes, in the description of manners, and in the flow of a tender and insinuating eloquence.

No poet acquired a reputation so universal, and so permanent as Homer. Eschylus. said, that his tragedies were only the reliques of the magnificent banquet of Homer: Plato, in decrying the poets, endeavoured to imitate him, in his harmonious prose: Aristotle formed the principles of his Poetica after the Iliad: and. Vingil is indebted to him for his sublimest beauties.

We are not informed in what manner the poems of Homer -were preserved. It is pretended that they were chanted, by certain rhapsodists, in detached pieces, in towns and villages, as the Caledonians sung the poems of Ossian; that Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens, was the first who arranged them in the order they have now descended to us. It is, nevertheless, believed that Lycurgus had previously collected them; it is honourable to the poet to have found favour in the sight of such an austere legislator. Homer had many enthusiastic admirers among men of the finest taste, and found detractors in those of less judgment-in supporters of contradiction and of paradox. We well know what was the fate of Zoilus; his existence was des

picable and unhappy; and his death avenged, in a cruel manner, the glory of Homer, whose fame he had aspersed; whether, as Vitruvius observes, he was crucified in Egypt, or burnt alive at Smyrna. The works of this great poet raised a host of defamers, in the seventeenth century; but it is sufficient to remark, with the exception of La Motte, and Fontenelle, that these sacrilegious' cotemporaries of the god of poetry were inferior writers, who had not the smallest pretensions to be jealous of the brilliancy of his reputation. The defenders of Homer were, Despreaux, Racine, and Fenelon. The best dissertation that has been written on the author of the Epopoea, is that prefixed by Pope to his translation of the Iliad; in this masterly performance, erudition, taste, and philosophy, appear combined. Of the merits of his version it is unnecessary to speak; it is an eternal monument of the genius and the industry of Pope.

Homer possesses all the resources of the figurative style, and all the delicacy of the simple. Strabo discovers in him all the precision of the most skilful geographer. His poems may be compared to the shield of divine manufacture, which he has so ably described. He presents us with the most faithful picture of the achievements of war, and of the labour of peace; he places the universe before our view; he has all the beauties of the various dialects he employs; his most unfinished passages surpass the finest pieces of other poets, all of whom he excels in vigour, in the extent of his genius, in the richness of his fancy, and in the powers of invention. His works assured him such a supremacy, that the ancients admired and venerated him as the high priest of nature; who had admitted him into her most secret

sanctuary, and made him a partaker of her sublimest mysteries.

We have nothing certain as to his life; it is pretended that he lived in indigence, and was blind; that rejected and despised when living, he was reduced to beg for sustenance about the seven cities which, after his death, disputed the honour of his birth, and raised temples to his memory. This rivalship has been injurious to the researches undertaken by the learned, at various epochs, to establish his native country. The most singular monument of this kind, in existence, is the life of Homer, attributed to Herodotus, which appears, however, little more than the result of the fables in circulation during the period when that great historian flourished.