and in the last that I do : but this is a temper which every polite man should overlook in a lady.

It

To punish my ingratitude, she resolves to expose my blun ders, and selects two which I suppose are the most flagrant, out of the many for which she could have chastised me. happens that the first of these is in part the translator's, and in part her own, without any share of mine: she quotes the end of a sentence, and he puts in French what I never wrote in English: "Homer," I said, "opened a new and boundless walk for his imagination, and created a world for himself in the invention of fable;" which he translates, "Homer crea pour son usage un monde mouvant, en inventant la fable."

Madame Dacier justly wonders at this nonsense in me, and I, in the translator. As to what I meant by Homer's invention of fable, it is afterward particularly distinguished from that extensive sense in which she took it, by these words: "If Homer was not the first who introduced the deities (as Herodotus imagines) into the religion of Greece, he seems the first who brought them into a system of machinery for poetry."

The other blunder she accuses me of is, the mistaking a passage in Aristotle, and she is pleased to send me back to this philosopher's treatise of poetry, and to her preface on the Odyssey, for my better instruction. Now, though I am saucy enough to think that one may sometimes differ from Aristotle without blundering, and though I am sure one may sometimes fall into an error by following him servilely, yet I own, that to quote any author for what he never said, is a blunder; (but, by-the-way, to correct an author for what he never said, is somewhat worse than a blunder.) My words were these: "As there is a greater variety of characters in the Iliad than in any other poem, so there is of speeches. Everything in it has manners, as Aristotle expresses it; that is, everything is acted or spoken; very little passes in narration." She justly says, that "Everything which is acted or spoken has not necessarily manners, merely because it is acted or spoken." Agreed; but I would ask the question, whether anything can have manners which is neither acted nor spoken? If not, then the whole Iliad being almost spent in speech and action, almost everything in it has manners; since Homer has been proved before, in a long paragraph of the preface, to have excelled in drawing characters and painting manners; and indeed this whole poem is one continued occasion of showing this bright part of his talent.

To speak fairly, it is impossible she could read even the translation and take my sense so wrong as she represents it: but I was first translated ignorantly, and then read partially. My expression indeed was not quite exact; it should have been, Everything has manners, as Aristotle calls them." But such a fault, methinks, might have been spared; since if one was to

look with that disposition she discovers towards me, even on her own excellent writings, one might find some mistakes which no context can redress; as where she makes Eustathius call Cratisthenes the Phliasian, Callisthenes the Physician.* What a triumph might some slips of this sort have afforded to Homer's, hers, and my enemies, from which she was only screened by their happy ignorance! How unlucky had it been, when she insulted M. de la Motte for omitting a material passage in the speech of Helen to Hector, Iliad vi.,† if some champion for the moderns had by chance understood so much Greek, as to whisper him, that there was no such passage in Homer!

Our concern, zeal, and even jealousy for our great author's honour, were mutual; our endeavours to advance it were equal; and I have as often trembled for it in her hands, as she could in mine. It was one of the many reasons I had to wish the longer life of this lady, that I must certainly have regained her good opinion, in spite of all misrepresenting translators whatever. I could not have expected it on any other terms than being approved as great, if not as passionate, an admirer of Homer as herself. For that was the first condition of her favour and friendship; otherwise not one's taste alone, but one's morality had been corrupted, nor would any man's religion have been unsuspected, who did not implicitly believe in an author whose doctrine is so conformable to Holy Scripture. However, as different people have different ways of expressing their belief, some purely by public and general acts of worship, others by a reverend sort of reasoning and inquiry about the grounds of it; it is the same in admiration, some prove it by exclamations, others by respect. I have observed that the loudest huzzas given to a great man in a triumph proceed not from his friends, but the rabble; and as I have fancied it the same with the rabble of critics, a desire to be distinguished from them has turned me to the more moderate, and I hope, more rational method. Though I am a poet, I would not be an enthusiast; and though I am an Englishman, I would not be furiously of a party. I am far from thinking myself that genius, on whom, at the end of these remarks, Madame Dacier congratulates my country; one capable of "correcting Homer, and consequently of reforming mankind, and amending this constitution." It was not to Great Britain this ought to have been applied, since our nation has one happiness for which she might have preferred it to her own, that as much as we abound in other miserable misguided sects, we have at least none of the blasphemers of HoWe steadfastly and unanimously believe both his poem and our constitution to be the best that ever human wit invent

mer.

* Dacier Remarques sur le 4me livre de l'Odyss. p. 467.

† De la Corruption du Goût.

ed: that the one is not more incapable of amendment than the other; and, old as they both are, we despise any French or Englishman whatever, who shall presume to retrench, to innovate, or to make the least alteration in either. Far therefore from the genius for which Madame Dacier mistook me, my whole desire is but to preserve the humble character of a faithful translator, and a quiet subject.

END OF HOMER