compares these two poets ought to have always in his eye. Some accuse him

for the same things which they overlook or praise in the other; as when

they prefer the fable and moral of the Æneis to those of the Iliad, for

the same reasons which might set the Odyssey above the Æneis; as that the

hero is a wiser man, and the action of the one more beneficial to his

country than that of the other; or else they blame him for not doing what

he never designed; as because Achilles is not as good and perfect a prince

as Æneas, 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

The Iliad of Homer