feet of which it is composed give you, by their peculiar and distinct harmony, disjecta membra poeta. The great variety of these feet furnished the orators with innumerable ways of harmonising their periods, without ever deviating into verse. I likewise read Longinus, chapters forty-two and forty-three, which finished him. The fortysecond contains some examples of fine descriptions, degraded by one or two low words. In the last chapter of this small, but valuable treatise, Longinus examines the reason why no sublime writers were to be found in his age. He treats this question (which, taken in the utmost latitude, is perhaps a Gordian knot) with more eloquence than accuracy. It is, however, worth remarking, that he still continues to enforce his precept by his example. He appears pretty plainly to have been of opinion, that the true sublime, especially in eloquence, could never belong to slaves; and that it could be found only in geniuses nursed under a popular government, whose writings breathed the same liberty as their actions. These ideas are noble, and perhaps true; but they were too harsh for the court of Palmyra. Longinus was forced to enervate them, not only by the term dikatorarn, which he takes care to apply twice to the present despotism; but by employing the stale pretence of putting his own thoughts into the mouth of a nameless philosopher. I read on the same question Seneca, Epist. cxiv. p. 646–651; edit. Lips. apud Plantin. He considers it in another, and, I think, a better light than Longinus. Both attribute the decay of taste to luxury and its attendant vices; but the Greek, considering them almost as passive, thinks that they only extinguish all emulation and application; while the Roman looks upon them as very active, by accustoming our taste to relish only the tricks of novelty and affectation, and to despise genuine and simple eloquence. The character of Mæcenas is a fine caricature. How different is he from the Mæcenas of Virgil and Horace. As to Longinus in general, after what I have observed upon almost every chapter, I have little left to say. It is certainly a fine performance; the style is faulty only by being rather too poetical for a didactic work. In general, I should adopt most of his decisions; only I think that for want of having a clear idea of the sublime, he has sometimes blamed passages for being deficient in that respect, or praised them for excelling in it, whose nature and design neither had, nor required, that kind of beauty. I could likewise have wished that Longinus had not always confined himself to single passages, but had pointed out that sublime which results from the choice and general disposition of a subject. I think that Longinus shows real taste and genius, by his indulgence in the sallies of a warm imagination, and by his severity to the prettinesses of the art; though, like most men of genius, who possess more force and elevation than delicacy, he may sometimes have confounded refinement and affectation. As to his commentators, Langbænius is ostentatiously pedantic, and learnedly absurd; Le Fevre is, as usual, vain, bold, and ingenious; the notes of Tollius are full of taste, good criticism, and real erudition. There are a number of corrupted

passages in Longinus, which by the help of manuscripts, or from his own conjectures, he has restored extremely well.

26th. I intended to have composed a long abstract of that Greek Life of Homer, which I finished September the fourth, and actually wrote a page of it; but other things intervening, I went no further. As it is now too late, I shall take this occasion of giving a short account of it. Its title is improper enough; after an history of Homer, comprised in a few lines, and full of blunders, the author proceeds in his main design, which was to show that there was no art or science of which Homer was not the father and laid the foundations; a design which proves the excessive veneration of the Greeks still better than the temples they erected to him. To support so vain an argument, much sophistry and false reasoning was necessary. The following are some specimens of them which struck me. 1. It is almost impossible to follow him through his innumerable divisions and subdivisions, which, instead of easing our attention, and fixing our memory, perplex the one, and overburthen the other. This is a sufficient inconvenience in this method, but another infinitely greater results from it. Those divisions, by treating every minute part of a subject separately, often pass over the most essential notions of it, because they are common to the whole. Nay, as they are commonly the work of a trifling genius, they are sometimes founded only upon some very trivial and accessory ideas, without ever reaching the fundamental principles. Thus, when our critic wants to prove Homer an historian, he accurately divides the requisites of history into the mention of person, cause, place, time, instrument, passion, action, and manners; proves that in some part of his works the poet mentions each of these, and then very accurately concludes that he was an historian. What a minute division of history, which forgets all the most important parts of it, accuracy, impartiality, and an hundred more !* 2. To prove Homer's knowledge universal, he is forced, in several sciences, to instance things hardly above the rank of self-evident ideas, with which no peasant in a civilised country is unacquainted. Thus he is the father of arithmetic, because by saying that fifty men guarded each of the thousand Trojan fires, he does not compute himself, but furnishes the occasion of computing the Trojan army at fifty thousand men.† 3. One would think it sufficient for Homer's honour, to have been the father of all known truth; and that it was rather lowering, than raising his character, to make him acquainted with all the opinions of latter ages, however extravagant or contradictory to one another. The system of Thales, who makes water the universal principle; that of Xenophanes, who to water adds earth; and the general opinion which acknowledges four elements, are all borrowed from Homer; though to have asserted all these opposite principles, implies more learning than judgment. Indeed, when he speaks of the Stoics and Peripatetics, he saves the contradiction very ingeniously. Homer was acquainted with both systems; but he looked upon the

* Vit. Homer. p. 315-318.

Idem, p. 360.

+ Idem, p. 324.

first as more exalted and conformable to reason; on the latter, as more practicable and conformable to experience.* 4. When the plain text of Homer appears absurd, or at least furnishes no proofs of science, he had recourse to the allegorical sense, where he discovers a thousand mysteries.† I cannot here explain my sentiments on that head, nor illustrate and enforce a distinction which has not been enough attended to, viz. of what was allegory to Homer, and what was indeed allegory in its origin, but, through various mixtures and length of time, appeared then in a quite different shape. I have the less occasion to do it here, as my author is much soberer on this head, than many others of the ancients; some of whom (Heraclides for instance) have written whole books upon Homer's allegories. 5. My author, like many of the ancients, is very fond of drawing philosophical conclusions from a resemblance of words and fanciful etymologies; a method which, with reason, would give one a poor opinion of their logic. Thus our author, from the resemblance of depas and dεopos, would infer that Homer looked upon the soul as shackled and imprisoned by the body, without ever considering that such grammatical conjectures want proof themselves, instead of being able to furnish it to other positions. Indeed it is more excusable to employ such arguments for the existence, than for the truth of an opinion. 6. These two last faults are common to him with many; his reasonings about numbers are more peculiar to him. He runs, and carries Homer with him, into all the Pythagorean whimsies,§ the perfections of the monad and odd numbers, and the imperfections of the duad and even ones. He quotes several passages of Homer where the monad is praised, such as the eis Koparoc_εow, without once inquiring whether it is praised for an absolute or for a relative merit. Notwithstanding these criticisms, I am far from despising this Life of Homer. The author was a man of much subtlety and ingenuity; so that you are often pleased with the imagination, though you despise the reasoning. Nay, the reasoning is often more the vice of his subject than his own. When he treats of those arts, of which Homer was really a master, language, rhetoric, and morality, he is very solid and instructive. You find many nice observations concerning Homer's style, his use of the various Greek dialects, his deviations from the common rules of grammar, and the different figures he employs. One that struck me relates to the genders. He often, for the sake either of metre, or energy, employs a masculine epithet to a feminine substantive; but it is only speaking of those qualities of the mind which are of no sex, or if of any, which appertain rather to the male, such as κλυτος Ιπποδάμεια. In treating of Homer's rhetoric, he explains very well the artifice of the speeches of the second Iliad; the various eloquence of the ambassadors to Achilles, and the gradations by which he gave way to them.¶¶ So much for the original. editor was mighty negligent in not distinguishing properly Homer's * Vit. Homer, p. 352-354.

Idem, p. 342.

|| Idem, p. 303.

† Vit. Homer, p. 325-330.

§ Idem, p. 358-360.

¶ Idem, p. 371-377.

The

verses from the prose, which is full of them, and not referring us to the places where they are to be found. The translator, whom I can scarcely believe to be Dr. Gale, has committed numberless blunders. I shall mention a curious one. He translates this verse of Homer, Αρνειον, ταυρον τε, συων τ' επιβητορα καπρον, Odyss. Λ. 130,

by Arietem porcorum custodem.* Besides the nonsense of the expression, and the absurdity of making one animal only, where grammar and the sense of his author required three; need I quote Constantine and Pollux to show that Enropa signifies ascensorem, and is metaphorically applied to the copulation of animals? not translate it at once,

Agnum, et taurum, suisque ascensorem aprum ?

Why

29th. I read Tollius's Gustus Animadversionum Criticarum, at the end of Longinus, p. 348–360. I cannot say that they any ways answered my expectation. Tollius was not equal to such critical parallels as they are designed for, between some of the ancient writers. The first is between a passage of Pindar and another of Horace. It results from his laborious inquiry, that the Greek tongue is more harmonious than the Latin. The second, between Theocritus and Virgil, teaches me, 1. That among the ancients, presenting or throwing apples was customary between lovers. 2. That Virgil is far inferior to the Greek poet, since his Polyphemus boasts of having milk only all the year, whereas the Cyclop of Theocritus boasts that he has both milk and cheese. The third is between Apollonius and Ovid. As the Greeks are always to have the advantage, and Ovid is very open to criticism, Tollius talks rather more to the purpose.

30th. I read Tollius, p. 360-371. A comparison between Virgil and a little poem of Petronius. Very bad indeed. However, I must now go through these comparisons.

31st. I went to church, heard a pretty good sermon from Mr. L***, and read the second lesson, the fourth chapter of St. Luke, in Greek.

November 1st.-I read Tollius, p. 371-381, the end. He compares Homer and Virgil as to the manner of Turnus' and Hector's deaths. He reasons better than usual, but did not consider that Hector's not asking for mercy like Turnus, is no proof of his superior courage. Turnus was slightly wounded; Hector mortally. I began to-day, as a natural supplement to Longinus, a philosophical inquiry into the nature of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, and read the introduction upon Taste, p. 1-40, which, like all other researches into our primary ideas, is rather loose and unsatisfactory. The division, however, of the passive impression which is common to all men, and relates chiefly to positive beauty or faultiness, and the active judgment which is founded on knowledge, and exercised mostly on comparison, pleased me; perhaps because very like an idea of my own.

* Vit. Homer, p. 359.

+ Constant. in Voc. Jul. Poll. Onomastic. lib. v. c. 15, p. 92.

2nd. I read the Enquiry, p. 40-95, which comprises the first part. The author's object is to class our various passions and sensations, and to investigate our affections, in order to discover how we are and ought to be affected. All those of the mind he refers to two classes;-self preservation and society. The former renders us sensible of pain and terror; the latter, in their various branches, (of sympathy, imitation, and terror,) of pleasure, love, and joy. Their nature is eternally distinct; and they never can run into one another. This naturally leads Mr. Burke to deny that the privation of pleasure ever produces positive pain; and, vice versa, the sensation produced by the absence of pain he calls delight, a solemn, awful feeling, very different from positive pleasure.

4th. I finished the Enquiry, which contains in all 342 pages. The author writes with ingenuity, perspicuity, and candour. His reigning principles are, that pain, when absent, and moderated to terror, is productive of that solemn delight which forms the beauty of the sublime; this idea he pursues through its various shapes of immensity either of time or place, power, darkness, &c. It is surprising how much Longinus and Mr. Burke differ as to their idea of the operations of the sublime in our minds. The one considers it as exalting us with a conscious pride and courage, and the other as astonishing every faculty, and depressing the soul itself with terror and amazement. If it should be found that the sublime produces this double, and seemingly contrary effect, we must look out for some more general principles which may account for it, though we may adopt still many particular materials and observations of both writers in the investigation of it. Such is Mr. Burke's system of the sublime: his notion of the beautiful is, that it is produced by whatever gives us pleasure. Perhaps his idea, confined as it is to the pleasures of sense, (heightened indeed by the imagination,) is yet too general. What connexion can he discover between the pleasures of the taste and the idea of beautiful? However, he thinks, and I believe with reason, that any thing to appear beautiful either to the sight or touch, must convey to the sense an idea of softness and gradual variation, and to the imagination those of gentleness, delicacy, and even fragility. The ideas of beauty being in the least founded on those of order, proportion, or utility, he entirely explodes. I cannot help observing here, that in speaking of anything beautiful, we consider the figure as so essential to it as not to be altered without changing the nature of it; and the colour as an accessory quality which may be varied at pleasure--a proof that sometimes common feelings are conformable to philosophical speculations, where we should the least expect it. Mr. Burke employs his last part in considering words as the signs of ideas. He remarks that they do not commonly, when pronounced, call up in the mind a picture of the idea for which they stand; and that consequently, in poetry or eloquence we are as often affected by the words themselves, as by clear images of what they are designed to represent. I began today Ubbo Emmius' Geographical Description of Greece, (which