had Briseis been a negro, and Achilles so capricious as to prefer her black but comely to paler beauties, the quarrel consequent on her violent abreption from his arms by the mandate of Agamemnon, might not have given the opening of the Iliad that sort of dignity which a modern -that is Dr Blair-looks for in a great epic poem ; but still, as the act would have been one of most insolent injustice, unstomachable by Achilles, who was not a person to play upon with impunity, the quarrel would at least have been natural, and so would the opening of the Iliad; in which case, perhaps, we might have dispensed with the dignity, just as we do on seeing a delicate white Christian lady get married and murdered by an immense monster of a Moor, the very pillow be coming pathetic, and the bed-sheets full of ruth and pity as a shroud prepared for the grave.

Well would it be for the world, lay and clerical, civil and military, were kings and kingdoms to go together by the ears, for no less dignified cause than that which produced the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon. Indeed, we may safely defy Dr Blair, or any body else, to produce an instance of an equally dignified cause of quarrel between crowned heads with that which ennobles the opening of the Iliad. Ambassadors keep hopping about at much expense from court to court all over Europe, and Asia too at times, not to mention America and Africa, maintaining the honour of their respective sovereigns, insulted, it would often seem, by such senile, or rather anile, indefinable drivelling, as would have ashamed the auld wife herself of Auchtermuchty; while state-papers, as they are called,present such a gawlimaufry of gossip as was never equalled in the hostile correspondence of a bro ken-up batch of veteran village tabbies, caterwauling in consequence having all together set their caps at the new minister. Not one war in twenty that originates in any more dignified dispute, than, in a vegetable market, a squabble about a contested string of onions, or, in a fish one, about the price of some stinking haddies. What even is the right of search? But let us not disgust ourselves by

VOL. XXX. NO. CLXXXII.

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the recollection of the sickening sillinesses that have so often drenched Europe in blood. We do not abhor a general war, for we despise it. The quarrels which cause general wars in our times, would indeed make pretty openings for great epic poems. They would possess, we presume, all that sort of dignity which a modern looks for in such noble compositions. Homer had no idea of dignity; Dr Blair had; Achilles and Agamemnon went almost to loggerheads about Briseis; we could mention kings who deluged their lands in blood, tears, and taxation, about a beer-barrel.

The excellent Doctor talks with uncommon nonchalance about honest people's undignified daughters. The daughter of the Priest of Apollo, "in the plunder of a city, had fallen to Agamemnon's share of booty." She had; and the old gentleman (as dignified as if he had been Moderator) not at all relishing it, complained to the god he served, who sent a plague into the Grecian camp. Now a plague, up to the time of Dr Hugh Blair, had uniformly been considered a very dignified visitation-and, begging the Doctor's pardon, it is considered so still-sufficiently so to satisfy the mind of any moderate modern meditating on what may be fit matter for the opening of a great epic poem. The plague Apollo sent was a very superior personage to Cholera Morbus, although even he is not to be sneezed at, even when, on his arrival at Leith from Riga, merely performing quarantine. Why, Apollo was himself the plague. He descended from heaven to earth UTI εοικως. The sun became a shadow-day grew night-and life was death. Is not that dignity enough for the Doctor?

Throughout the whole passage you perceive the Doctor fumbling at the facetious. Having determined that the opening of the Iliad should be deemed deficient in dignity, he sketches it sneeringly and sarcastically, and yet it lours upon us, in spite of his idle derision, as something prodigious and portentous-black with pestilence and war, disunion, despair, and death.

But ere we dismiss Death and the Doctor, observe, that while the latter somewhat pedantical personage is

supposing himself to be criticising in this passage the opening of the Iliad, and pointing out how undignified it is, why, he is sketching, without being aware of it, the plan of the whole poem-beginning, middle, and end. Is it all undignified together? If not, at what point, pray, does the meanness merge into the dignified, and the march begin of the majestical? "Such is the basis of the whole action of the Iliad," he continues, meaning thereby to say, that it is all as insignificant in itself as the opening with the quarrel of two chieftains about a female slave. "Hence," he well says, cc rose all those 'speciosa miracula,' as Horace terms them, which fill up that extraordinary poem ; and which have had the power of interesting almost all the nations of Europe during every age since the days of Homer. The general admiration commanded by a poetical plan so very different from what any one would have formed in our times ought not, upon reflection, to be matter of surprise. For besides that a fertile genius can enrich and beautify any subject on which it is employed, it is to be observed that ancient manners, how much soever they contradict our present notions of dignity and refinement, afford, nevertheless, materials for poetry superior in some respects to those which are furnished by a more polished state of society. They discover human nature more open and undisguised, without any of those studied forms of behaviour which now conceal men from one another. They give free scope to the strongest and most impetuous motions of the mind, which make a better figure in description than calm and temperate feelings. They shew us our native prejudices, appetites, and desires, exerting themselves without control. From this state of manners, joined with the advantage of that strong and expressive style, which commonly distinguishes the composition of early ages, we have ground to look for more of the boldness, ease, and freedom of native genius, in compositions of such a period, than in those of more civilized times. And accordingly, the two great characters of the Homeric poetry are, Fire and Simplicity."

The one great original error of sup

posing that the subject-matter of the Iliad is in itself undignified, and that its poetical plan is, on that account, so very different from what any one would have formed in our times, runs through the whole of the passage we have quoted from Blair, and vitiates the philosophy of its criticism. Had any one in our times chosen the subject for an epic poem in the heroic ages of Greece, he would have been puzzled to find one different from that of the Tale of Troy Divine, unless, perhaps, he had been at once a Homer and a Shakspeare, and then there is no saying what he might not have done; and had any one in our times chosen to choose a subject from our times, or from any other times intermediate between that heroic and this unheroic age, he might have stretched his brain till the crack of doom, ere he had found one more dignified; even though the Iliad begins with the wrath of Achilles for sake of a female slave, Briseis, is conversant about the middle with his furious grief for loss of a male friend, Patroclus, draws to a close with the lamentations of two old people, Hecuba and Priam, and ends with the funeral rites of Hector the Tamer of Horses.

But making allowances for that first and fatal error, all must admit that Blair speaks truly and finely towards the close of the paragraph; and that he says as much in a few simple sentences, and more, too, than both the Schlegels put together, in their shadowy style, would have said in a whole essay written in Cloudland. The good Doctor warms as he walks-and finally escapes out of the ungenial gloom of heresy, declaring, with an inconsistency that does him infinite credit, "that the subject of the Iliad must unquestionably be admitted to be in the main happily chosen."-" Homer has, with great judgment, selected one part of the Trojan War, the Quarrel betwixt Achilles and Agamemnon, and the events to which that quarrel gave rise." In short, the Professor forgets all his former folly about want of dignity and so forth, and expresses the admiration natural to so fine a mind, of the miracle wrought by Homer.

We said that we should seize on Sotheby, as a subject for six critiques

-that is to say, on his translation of the Iliad, as affording us fine opportunities of launching out upon Homer. In the present utter dearth of poetry, caused by a drought-" in the Albion air adust"-by the political dog-star, which not only looks so exceedingly Sirius, but foams at the mouth like the Father of Hydrophobia, if not Hydrophobia himself, we see nothing left for us but to take a flight of a few thousand years back into antiquity; and being partial to the epic, we propose prosing away thereupon-when wearied taking a tift at Tragedy-and occasionally, laying our lugs into a cup of Lyrics. Having descanted on the First and Sixth Books of the Iliad, in a style not unsatisfactory to those who perused our articles, and inoffensive to those who, with a skip, gave them the go-by-both classes numerous -suppose, gruff or gentle reader, that we take a glimpse of what is going on in the Ninth. Some of the Books of the Iliad are, as you know, each in itself a poem. The Iliad is a river, that expands itself into Twenty-Four Lakes. Each Lake is

a beautiful or magnificent watery world in itself, reflecting its own imagery all differently divine. The current is perceptible in each that flows through them all-so that you have always a river as well as a lake feeling; in the seclusion of any one are never forgetful of the rest; and though contented, were there neither inlet nor outlet to the circular sea on which you at the time may be voyaging, yet assured all the while that your course is progressive, and will cease at last, only when the waters on which you are wafted along by heavenly airs shall disappear underground among some Old Place of Tombs.

Now the Night-scene in the Ninth Book is bright with Achilles-an apparition, who vanished from our bodily eyes in the first, although he continued to move through the succeeding seven-and especially in the sixth-before those of our imagination. A night-scene in Homer, even without Achilles, is worth looking at-and therefore let us look at it without him-Lo, here it is!

Now this is, perhaps, the most celebrated simile in the Iliad. It has been lauded to the skies, of which it speaks, and from which it is sprung, by scholars who will here see no beauty but in the original Greek, and in it all beauty; while, by the same scholars, the heaven reflected in Pope's translation is declared to be not only not Homer's heaven, but no heaven at all-a night-scene, say they, such as never was seen on this planet, and such as on this planet is impossible. People again, who are no scholars,

admire Pope's picture as celestial, and without pretending to know that language, devoutly believe that it is all one in the Greek. Now, observe, most perspicacious of perusers of Maga's face, and of the face of heaven, that three separate questions are submitted to your decisionFirst, what is the meaning and the merit of the said simile, as it stands in Homer? secondly, what is the merit or demerit of the said simile, as it stands in Pope? and, thirdly, what is its character as it stands there, viewed in the light of a translation?

As it is not impossible you may have forgot your Greek, or improbable that you may never have remembered it, allow us, with all humility, to present you with a literal prose translation.

We are now all ready to proceed to form and deliver judgment. Taking, then, Homer's Greek and Christopher's English to be one and the same, what was the object of the old Ionian in conceiving this vision of the nocturnal heaven? Why, aim and impulse were one. Under the imagination-moving mental perception of a thousand fires burning on the earth between the Grecian ships and the streams of Xanthus, Homer suddenly saw a similar, that is, for the time being, a kindred and congenial exhibition, up aloft in the heavens. That was the impulse. But the moment he saw the heavenly apparition, he felt it to be kindred and congenial with the one on earth, and under the influence of that feeling, he delighted to describe it, in order to glorify the one on earth-that was his aim-in four and a half hexameters, which have won the admiration of the world.

But the world often admires without knowing why, any better than the wiseacres who, in their pride, would correct the world. Why then has the world-meaning thereby that part of it that could or can read Greekadmired so prodigiously this passage? Simply, because heaven and earth, the starry sky and the field with its thousand fires, appeared mutual reflections of each other; for pleasant it is for us mortal creatures, high and low, rich and poor, to recognise a resemblance between our limited and evanescent scenery,especially if the work of our own hands, which watch-fires are, the same being of wood we ourselves have gathered and heaped up into piles, and the scenery of everlasting infinitude. Depend upon it this emotion was in the very rudest minds when they kindled beal-fires. To the most beggarly bonfire it brings fuel. Homer felt this; and