id in his
thoughts, and took all the liberties, both of numbers and of
expressions, which his language, and the age in which he lived, allowed
him: Homer's invention was more copious, Virgil's more confined; 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 formed: 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 AEneas, and
though 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 wandered, 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 besieged. 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 though 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 allowed the second place. Mr Hobbs, in the preface to
his own bald translation of the Ilias (studying poetry as he did
mathematics, when it was too late), Mr Hobbs, 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 colouring of the
work, which in the order of nature is last to be considered: 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 colours, 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 inconsistent, or the thoughts
unnatural, then the finest colours are but daubing, and th