Each wight who reads not, and but scans and spells, Each Word-catcher that lives on syllables, NOTES. 166 tional cause for Pope's resentment: that Atterbury, being in company with Bentley and Pope, insisted upon knowing the Doctor's opinion of the English Homer; and that, being earnestly pressed to declare his sentiments freely, he said, “The verses are good verses, but the work is not Homer, it is Spondanus." It may, however, be observed in favour of Pope, that Dr. Clarke, whose critical exactness is well known, has not been able to point out above three or four mistakes in the sense throughout the whole Iliad. The real faults of that translation are of another kind : they are such as remind us of Nero's gilding a brazen statue of Alexander the Great, cast by Lysippus. Pope, in a letter which Dr. Rutherforth shewed me at Cambridge in the year 1771, written to a Mr. Bridges at Fulham, mentions his consulting Chapman and Hobbes, and talks of " their authority, joined to the knowledge of my own imperfectness in the language, overruled me." These are the very words which I transcribed at the time. Ver. 163. These ribalds,] How deservedly this title is given to the genius of PHILOLOGY, may be seen by a short account of the manners of the modern Scholiasts. When in these latter ages, human learning raised its head in the West; and its tail, verbal criticism, was, of course, to rise with it; the madness of the Critics soon became so offensive, that the grave stupidity of the Monks might appear the more tolerable evil. J. Argyropylus, a mercenary Greek, who came to teach school in Italy, after the sacking of Constantinople by the Turks, used to maintain that Cicero understood neither Philosophy nor Greek while another of his countrymen, J. Lascaris by name, threatened to demonstrate that Virgil was no Poet. Countenanced by such great examples, a French Critic afterward undertook to prove that Aristotle did not understand Greek, nor Titus Livius, Latin. It has been since discovered that Josephus was ignorant of Hebrew; and Erasmus so pitiful a linguist, that, Burman assures us, were he now alive, he would not deserve to be put at the head of a country school: and even since it has been found out that Pope had no invention, and is only a Poet by courtesy. For though time has stripped the present race of Pedants of all the real accomplishments of their predecessors, it Ev'n such small Critics some regard may claim, ence. NOTES. has conveyed down this spirit to them, unimpaired; it being found much easier to ape their manners than to imitate their sciHowever, those earlier RIBALDS raised an appetite for the Greek language in the West; insomuch, that Hermolaus Barbarus, a passionate admirer of it, and a noted critic, used to boast, that he had invoked and raised the Devil, and puzzled him into the bargain, about the meaning of the Aristotelian ENTEAEXEIA. Another, whom Balzac speaks of, was as eminent for his Revelations; and was wont to say, that the meaning of such or such a verse, in Persius, no one knew but GOD and himself. While the celebrated Pomponius Lætus, in excess of veneration for Antiquity, became a real Pagan; raised altars to Romulus, and sacrificed to the Gods of Latium; in which he was followed by our countryman Baxter, in every thing, but in the costliness of his sacrifices. But if the Greeks cried down Cicero, the Italian Critics knew how to support his credit. Every one has heard of the childish excesses into which the ambition of being thought CICERONIANS carried the most celebrated Italians of this time. They abstained from reading the Scriptures for fear of spoiling their style: Cardinal Bembo used to call the Epistles of St. Paul by the contemptuous name of Epistolaccias, great overgrown Epistles. But ERASMUS cured their frenzy by that master-piece of good sense, his Ciceronianus. For which (in the way that Lunatics treat their Physicians) the elder Scaliger insulted him with all the brutal fury peculiar to his family and profession. His sons Joseph and Salmasius had indeed such endowments of nature and art, as might have raised modern learning to a rivalship with the ancient. Yet how did they and their adversaries tear and worry one another! The choicest of Joseph's flowers of speech were Stercus Diaboli, and Lutum Stercore maceratum. It is true, these were lavished upon his enemies: for his friends he had other things in store. In a letter to Thuanus, speaking of two of them, Clavius and Lipsius, he calls the first a monster of ignorance; and the other a slave to the Jesuits, and an Idiot. But so great was his love of sacred amity at the same time, that he says, I still keep up my correspondence with him, notwithstanding his Idiotry, for it is my principle to be constant in my friendships—Je ne reste Pretty! in amber to observe the forms Of hairs, or straws, or dirt, or grubs, or worms! NOTES. 169 de luy escrire, nonobstant son Idioterie, d'autant que je suis constant en amitié. The character he gives of his own Chronology, in the same letter, is no less extraordinary: Vous vous pouvez assurer que notre Eusebe sera un trésor des marveilles de la doctrine Chronologique. But this modest account of his own work is nothing in comparison of the idea the Father gives his bookseller of his own person. This bookseller was preparing something of Julius Scaliger's for the Press; and desired the Author would give him directions concerning his picture, which was to be set before the book. Julius's answer (as it stands in his collection of letters) is, that if the engraver could collect together the several graces of Massinissa, Xenophon, and Plato, he might then be enabled to give the public some faint and imperfect resemblance of his Person. Nor was Salmasius's judgment of his own parts less favourable to himself, as Mr. Colomies tells the story. This Critic, on a time, meeting two of his brethren, Mess. Gaulman and Maussac, in the Royal Library at Paris, Gaulman, in a virtuous consciousness of their importance, told the other two, that he believed they three could make head against all the Learned in Europe. To which the great Salmasius fiercely replied, “Do you and M. Maussac join yourselves to all that are learned in the world, and you shall find that I alone am a match for you all.". Vossius tells us, that when Laur. Valla had snarled at every name of the first order in antiquity, such as Aristotle, Cicero, and one whom I should have thought this Critic the likeliest to reverence, the redoubtable PRISCIAN, he impiously boasted that he had arms even against Christ himself. But Codrus Urcæus went farther, and actually used those arms which the other only threatened with. This man, while he was preparing some trifling piece of Criticism for the press, had the misfortune to hear his papers were destroyed by fire: on which he is reported to have broke out" Quodnam ego tantum scelus concepi, O Christe! quem ego tuorum unquam læsi, ut ita inexpiabili in me odio debaccheris? Audi ea quæ tibi mentis compos, et ex animo dicam. Si forte, cum ad ultimum vitæ finem pervenero, supplex accedam ad te oratum, neve audias, neve inter tuos accipias oro; cum Infernis Diis in æternum vitam agere decrevi." Whereupon, says my author, he quitted the converse of men, threw himself into The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare, NOTES. the thickest of a forest, and wore out the wretched remainder of his life in all the agonies of despair. W. Ver. 164. Slashing Bentley] This great man, with all his faults, deserved however to be put into better company. The following words of Cicero describe him not amiss: "Habuit a natura genus quoddam acuminis, quod etiam arte limaverat, quod erat in reprehendendis verbis versutum et solers; sed sæpe stomachosum, nonnunquam frigidum, interdum etiam facetum. W.-I shall add to this note an unpublished letter from my learned and excellent friend Mr. James Harris of Salisbury, addressed to Mr. John Upton, the editor of Spenser, and author of Observations on Shakspeare. "My good Friend, "I am much more rejoiced to hear you have found the cause of your disease, than to find you differ from me in my opinion about Horace. Dissension in matters of opinion (let the subject be what it will) is natural, I may say, even necessary, and brings no harm. Bitterness, for that reason, is neither necessary nor natural, and what I hope neither you nor I are susceptible of, neither with respect to friends nor strangers. "When I think of Bentley, I can't help comparing him to Virgil's Fame; "Ingrediturque solo, et caput inter nubila condit;" An immense monster, possessed of a thousand eyes and a thousand ears, to see, and hear, and know, every thing, but, at the same time, "Tam ficti pravique tenax, quam nuncia veri." The consciousness of his own great parts and accomplishments furnished him with a pride, that, as it made him condemn the sentiments of most others, so it made him deify his own errours. "For Horace, there is no doubt that he collected his pieces together, and so published them as we do, now-a-days, miscellanies. Common sense and practice, on similar occasions, is the same in all ages; nor is there any need of all Bentley's parade about Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, and others, to prove, what no one doubted, that the writers of short pieces, not long enough in Were others angry: I excus'd them too; Well might they rage, I gave them but their due. NOTES. themselves to make a just volume, should bring them together for that purpose, with a dedication or preface. This, however, is all that this critic has done (and a work, indeed, it is that a much less scholar than he was well equal to) in order to refute the far superior labours of Dacier and others, in fixing the dates of each particular piece. The whole of the dispute comes to this: the time of writing each particular Satire, Ode, or Epistle, has nothing farther to do with the time of the volume's publication, which contains it, than that the piece must necessarily have been written first: but every piece had undoubtedly its own date distinct from all the rest, according as joy or grief, health or sickness, summer or winter, and a thousand other incidents, afforded the occasion. When it was thus written, was it shut up (think you) and concealed, never shewn to the polite world with whom he lived, nor even to the friend to whom it was addressed, till he had composed enough of other pieces to make up a volume? Did Cæsar, for example, know nothing of that fine and sublime ode (the 37th of Book. i.) made on his grand victory at Actium, till he saw it in the same scroll or volume with thirty seven others, many on trifling and private subjects? Had Horace so little regard for so choice a piece, or was he even so bad a courtier, as to suppress it so long, and for no better reason? To publish, now-a-days, means to print; but, in those days, it was a publication to communicate a MS.; and it is not to be doubted, that, immediately on the victory and death of Cleopatra, the ode was in the hands of every man of taste in Rome. It was the practice (says Bentley) to publish their pieces semel simulque. But I say neither semel nor simul. The 4th Sat. 1. i. was published most evidently before the 10th of the same book, for the 10th vindicates it from the exceptions taken to it by the admirers of Lucilius. They were not, therefore, published originally simul. Again, the 4th Satire certainly made its appearance along with the 10th, when they composed one book or volume. It was therefore published twice, and not semel. "The ode upon Virgil's Voyage to Athens (according to Bentley's Chronology) was written at least eight years before Virgil made it. The ode, that so chearfully invites Virgil to a feast, according to the same great Critic's chronology, was ad |