when they are summoned by Mercury out of the palace of
Ulysses, emit a feeble, plaintive, inarticulate sound, [Greek:
trizousi], strident: whereas Agamemnon, and the shades that have been
long in the state of the dead, speak articulately. I doubt not but Homer
intended to show, by the former description, that when the soul is
separated from the organs of the body, it ceases to act after the same
manner as while it was joined to it; but how the dead recover their
voices afterwards is not easy to understand. In other respects Virgil
paints after Homer:--

_Pars tollere vocem
Exiguam: inceptus clamor frustratur hiantes."_

To this Mr. Pope replies, "But why should we suppose, with Dacier, that
these shades of the suitors (of Penelope) have lost the faculty of
speaking? I rather imagine that the sounds they uttered were signs of
complaint and discontent, and proceeded not from an inability to speak.
After Patroclus was slain he appears to Achilles, and speaks very
articulately to him; yet, to express his sorrow at his departure, he
acts like these suitors: for Achilles--

'Like a thin smoke beholds the spirit fly,
And hears a feeble, lamentable cry.'

Dacier conjectures that the power of speech ceases in the dead, till
they are admitted into a state of rest; but Patroclus is an instance to
the contrary in the Iliad, and Elpenor in the Odyssey, for they both
speak before their funereal rites are performed, and consequently before
they enter into a state of repose amongst the shades of the happy."

The critic, in his search for distant proofs, often omits the most
material one immediately at hand. Had Madame Dacier attended to the
episode of the souls of the suitors, the world had never seen her
ingenuity in these mythological conjectures; nor had Mr. Pope any need
to bring the case of Patroclus or Elpenor to overthrow her system.
Amphimedon, one of the suitors, in the very episode which gave birth to
Dacier's conjecture, tells his story very articulately to the shade of
Agamemnon, though he had not received the funereal rites:--

"Our mangled bodies, now deform'd with gore,
Cold and neglected spread the marble floor:
No friend to bathe our wounds! or tears to shed
O'er the pale corse! the honours of the dead."

ODYS. XXIV.

On the whole, the defence of Pope is almost as idle as the conjectures
of Dacier. The plain truth is, poetry delights in personification;
e