It is owing to the same vast invention, that his similes have been thought

too exuberant and full of circumstances. The force of this faculty is seen

in nothing more, than in its inability to confine itself to that single

circumstance upon which the comparison is grounded: it runs out into

embellishments of additional images, which, however, are so managed as not

to overpower the main one. His similes are like pictures, where the

principal figure has not only its proportion given agreeable to the

original, but is also set off with occasional ornaments and prospects. The

same will account for his manner of heaping a number of comparisons

together in one breath, when his fancy suggested to him at once so many

various and correspondent images. The reader will easily extend this

observation to more objections of the same kind.

If there are others which seem rather to charge him with a defect or

narrowness of genius, than an excess of it, those seeming defects will be

found upon examination to proceed wholly from the nature of the times he

lived in. Such are his grosser representations of the gods; and the

vicious and imperfect manners of his heroes; but I must here speak a word

of the latter, as it is a point generally carried into extremes, both by

the censurers and defenders of Homer. It must be a strange partiality to

antiquity, to think with Madame Dacier,(38) "that those times and manners

are so much the more excellent, as they are more contrary to ours." Who

can be so prejudiced in their favour as to magnify the felicity of those

ages, when a spirit of revenge and cruelty, joined with the practice of

rapine and robbery, reigned through the world: when no mercy was shown but

for the sake of lucre; when the greatest princes were put to the sword,

The Iliad of Homer