e event we attend to with the greatest
satisfaction is their defeat and death. I do not remember, in all that
multitude of deaths with which the Iliad is filled, that the fall of any
man, remarkable for his great stature and strength, touches us with
pity; nor does it appear that the author, so well read in human nature,
ever intended it should. It is Simoisius, in the soft bloom of youth,
torn from his parents, who tremble for a courage so ill suited to his
strength; it is another hurried by war from the new embraces of his
bride, young and fair, and a novice to the field, who melts us by his
untimely fate. Achilles, in spite of the many qualities of beauty which
Homer has bestowed on his outward form, and the many great virtues with
which he has adorned his mind, can never make us love him. It may be
observed, that Homer has given the Trojans, whose fate he has designed
to excite our compassion, infinitely more of the amiable, social virtues
than he has distributed among his Greeks. With regard to the Trojans,
the passion he chooses to raise is pity; pity is a passion founded on
love; and these _lesser_, and if I may say domestic virtues, are
certainly the most amiable. But he has made the Greeks far their
superiors in the politic and military virtues. The councils of Priam are
weak; the arms of Hector comparatively feeble; his courage far below
that of Achilles. Yet we love Priam more than Agamemnon, and Hector more
than his conqueror Achilles. Admiration is the passion which Homer would
excite in favor of the Greeks, and he has done it by bestowing on them
the virtues which have but little to do with love. This short digression
is perhaps not wholly beside our purpose, where our business is to show
that objects of great dimensions are incompatible with beauty, the more
incompatible as they are greater; whereas the small, if ever they fail
of beauty, this failure is not to be attributed to their size.

SECTION XXV.

OF COLOR.

With regard to color, the disquisition is almost infinite; but I
conceive the principles laid down in the beginning of this part are
sufficient to account for the effects of them all, as well as for the
agreeable effects of transparent bodies, whether fluid or solid. Suppose
I look at a bottle of muddy liquor, of a blue or red color; the blue or
red rays cannot pass clearly to the eye, but are suddenly and unequally
stopped by the intervention of little opaque bodies, which without
prepara