to mention that Longinus makes frequent
reference to the _Iliad_, as the great source of the sublime--

'A quo, ceu fonte perenni,
Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis';

for, as respected Grecian poets, and as respected _his_ sense of the
word, it cannot be denied that Homer was such. He was the great
well-head of inspiration to the Pagan poets of after times, who,
however (_as a body_), moved in the narrowest circle that has ever yet
confined the natural freedom of the poetic mind. But, in conceding
this, let it not be forgotten how much we concede--we concede as much
as Longinus demanded; that is, that Homer furnished an ideal or model
of fluent narration, picturesque description, and the first outlines
of what could be called characteristic delineations of persons.
Accordingly, uninventive Greece--for we maintain loudly that Greece,
in her poets, _was_ uninventive and sterile beyond the example of
other nations--received, as a traditional inheritance, the characters
of the Paladins of the Troad.[8] Achilles is always the
all-accomplished and supreme amongst these Paladins, the Orlando of
ancient romance; Agamemnon, for ever the Charlemagne; Ajax, for ever
the sullen, imperturbable, columnar champion, the Mandricardo, the
_Bergen-op-Zoom_ of his faction, and corresponding to our modern
'Chicken' in the pugilistic ring, who was so called (as the books of
the Fancy say) because he was a 'glutton'; and a 'glutton' in this
sense--that he would take any amount of cramming (_i. e._ any possible
quantum of 'milling,' or 'punishment'). Ulysses, again, is uniformly,
no matter whether in the solemnities of the tragic scene, or the
festivities of the Ovidian romance, the same shy cock, but also sly
cock, with the least thought of a white feather in his plumage; Diomed
is the same unmeaning double of every other hero, just as Rinaldo is
with respect to his greater cousin, Orlando; and so of Teucer,
Meriones, Idomeneus, and the other less-marked characters. The Greek
drama took up these traditional characters, and sometimes deepened,
saddened, exalted the features--as Sophocles, for instance, does with
his 'Ajax Flagellifer'--Ajax the knouter of sheep--where, by the way,
the remorse and penitential grief of Ajax for his own self-degradation,
and the depth of his affliction for the triumph which he had afforded to
his enemies--taken in connection with the tender fears of his wife,
Tecmessa, for the fate to which his gl