rgil was propriety of thoughts, and ornament of
words; Homer was rapid in his thoughts, and took all the liberties,
both of numbers and of expressions, which his language, and the age
in which he liv'd, allow'd him. Homer's invention was more copious,
Virgil's more confin'd; so that if Homer had not led the way, it was
not in Virgil to have begun heroic poetry; for nothing can be more
evident than that the Roman poem is but the second part of the
_Ilias_; a continuation of the same story, and the persons already
form'd; the manners of AEneas are those of Hector superadded to those
which Homer gave him. The adventures of Ulysses in the _Odysseis_ are
imitated in the first six books of Virgil's _Aeneis_; and tho' the
accidents are not the same, (which would have argued him of a servile,
copying, and total barrenness of invention,) yet the seas were the
same, in which both the heroes wander'd; and Dido cannot be denied to
be the poetical daughter of Calypso. The six latter books of Virgil's
poem are the four and twenty _Iliads_ contracted: a quarrel occasioned
by a lady, a single combat, battles fought, and a town besieg'd. I
say not this in derogation to Virgil, neither do I contradict anything
which I have formerly said in his just praise: for his episodes are
almost wholly of his own invention; and the form which he has given to
the telling makes the tale his own, even tho' the original story had
been the same. But this proves, however, that Homer taught Virgil to
design; and if invention be the first virtue of an epic poet, then the
Latin poem can only be allow'd the second place. Mr. Hobbes, in the
preface to his own bald translation of the _Ilias_ (studying poetry as
he did mathematics, when it was too late)--Mr. Hobbes, I say, begins
the praise of Homer where he should have ended it. He tells us that
the first beauty of an epic poem consists in diction, that is, in
the choice of words, and harmony of numbers; now the words are the
coloring of the work, which in the order of nature is last to
be consider'd. The design, the disposition, the manners, and the
thoughts, are all before it: where any of those are wanting or
imperfect, so much wants or is imperfect in the imitation of human
life; which is in the very definition of a poem. Words, indeed, like
glaring colors, are the first beauties that arise and strike the
sight: but if the draught be false or lame, the figures ill disposed,
the manners obscure or inconsisten