he never designed; as because Achilles is not as good and perfect a prince
as AEneas, when the very moral of his poem required a contrary character:
it is thus that Rapin judges in his comparison of Homer and Virgil. Others
select those particular passages of Homer which are not so laboured as
some that Virgil drew out of them: this is the whole management of
Scaliger in his Poetics. Others quarrel with what they take for low and
mean expressions, sometimes through a false delicacy and refinement,
oftener from an ignorance of the graces of the original, and then triumph
in the awkwardness of their own translations: this is the conduct of
Perrault in his Parallels. Lastly, there are others, who, pretending to a
fairer proceeding, distinguish between the personal merit of Homer, and
that of his work; but when they come to assign the causes of the great
reputation of the Iliad, they found it upon the ignorance of his times,
and the prejudice of those that followed: and in pursuance of this
principle, they make those accidents (such as the contention of the
cities, &c.) to be the causes of his fame, which were in reality the
consequences of his merit. The same might as well be said of Virgil, or
any great author whose general character will infallibly raise many casual
additions to their reputation. This is the method of Mons. de la Mott; who
yet confesses upon the whole that in whatever age Homer had lived, he must
have been the greatest poet of his nation, and that he may be said in his
sense to be the master even of those who surpassed him.(39)

In all these objections we see nothing that contradicts his title to the
honour of the chief invention: and as long as this (which is indeed the
characteristic of poetry itself) remains unequalled by his followers, he
still continues superior to them. A cooler judgment may commit fewer
faults, and be more approved in the eyes of one sort of critics: but that
warmth of fancy will carry the loudest and most universal applauses which
holds the heart of a reader under the strongest enchantment. Homer not
only appears the inventor of poetry, but excels all the inventors of other
arts, in this, that he has swallowed up the honour of those who succeeded
him. What he has done admitted no increase, it only left room for
contraction or regulation. He showed all the stretch of fancy at once; and
if he has failed in some of his flights, it was but because he attempted
everything. A work of t