but may be so _per
accidens._ I do not at this moment remember two emendations on Homer,
calculated to substantially improve the poetry of a passage, although a
mass of remarks, from Herodotus down to Loewe, have given us the history
of a thousand minute points, without which our Greek knowledge would be
gloomy and jejune.

But it is not on words only that grammarians, mere grammarians, will
exercise their elaborate and often tiresome ingenuity. Binding down an
heroic or dramatic poet to the block upon which they have previously
dissected his words and sentences, they proceed to use the axe and the
pruning knife by wholesale, and inconsistent in everything but their wish
to make out a case of unlawful affiliation, they cut out book after book,
passage after passage, till the author is reduced to a collection of
fragments, or till those, who fancied they possessed the works of some
great man, find that they have been put off with a vile counterfeit got up
at second hand. If we compare the theories of Knight, Wolf, Lachmann, and
others, we shall feel better satisfied of the utter uncertainty of
criticism than of the apocryphal position of Homer. One rejects what
another considers the turning-point of his theory. One cuts a supposed
knot by expunging what another would explain by omitting something else.

Nor is this morbid species of sagacity by any means to be looked upon as a
literary novelty. Justus Lipsius, a scholar of no ordinary skill, seems to
revel in the imaginary discovery, that the tragedies attributed to Seneca
are by _four_ different authors.(34) Now, I will venture to assert, that
these tragedies are so uniform, not only in their borrowed phraseology--a
phraseology with which writers like Boethius and Saxo Grammaticus were
more charmed than ourselves--in their freedom from real poetry, and last,
but not least, in an ultra-refined and consistent abandonment of good
taste, that few writers of the present day would question the capabilities
of the same gentleman, be he Seneca or not, to produce not only these, but
a great many more equally bad. With equal sagacity, Father Hardouin
astonished the world with the startling announcement that the AEneid of
Virgil, and the satires of Horace, were literary deceptions. Now, without
wishing to say one word of disrespect against the industry and
learning--nay, the refined acuteness--which scholars, like Wolf, have
bestowed upon this subject, I must express my fears, tha