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rity, and inattention to times and seasons, which did not at all com, port with the methodical arrangements of my time and family. 2, His gross addiction to that lowest and least excusable of all sensualities, immoderate drinking: and, 3. The uninteresting insipidity of his society; as it is impossible to engage his mind on any topic of mutual inquiry, to procure his opinion on any author or on any passage of an author, or to elicit any conversation of any kind to com pensate for the time, and attendance of his company. And as for Homer, Virgil, and Horace, I never could hear of the least critical effort on them in his life. He is, in general, devoid of all human affections; but such as he has, are of a misanthropic quality: nor do I think that any man exists, for whom his propensities rise to the lowest pitch of affection and esteem. He much resembles Porteus in Lycophron :

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though, I believe, he has satirical verses in his treasury, for Dr. Bellenden, as he calls him (Parr), and all his most intimate associates. But, in his knowledge of the Greek tragedies, and Aristophanes ; in his judgment of MSS. and in all that relates to the metrical proprieties of dramatic and lyric versification, with whatever is connected with this species of reading; none of his contemporaries must pretend to equal him. His grammatical knowledge also, and his acquaintance with the ancient lexicographers and etymologists, is most accurate and profound: and his intimacy with Shakspeare, B. Jonson, and other dramatic writers, is probably unequalled. He is, in short, a most extraordinary person in every view, but unamiable; and has been debarred of a comprehensive intercourse with Greek and Roman authors, by his excesses, which have made those acquirements impossible to him, from the want of that time, which must necessarily be expended in laborious reading, and for which no genius can be made a substitute. No man has ever paid a more voluntary and respectful homage to his talents, at all times, both publicly and privately, in writings and conversation, than myself: and I will be content to forfeit the esteem and affection of all mankind, whenever the least particle of envy and malignity is found to mingle itself with my opinions. My first reverence is to virtue; my second, only to talents and erudition: where both unite, that man is estimable indeed to me, and shall receive the full tribute of honour and affection."

Can we disown the leading strokes of this gloomy portrait ? can we but lament it should belong to one of the first scholars that England or that Europe ever saw?

"Who would not weep if such a man there be,

And

more than weep, if Atticus were he."

We should do no favour to our readers by presenting them

with another learned and ingenious inquiry into the nature and early use of the digamma. This inquiry, which meets us in letters 8, 9, 11, and some others, is however connected with another of more general interest in the walks of literature, the genuineness of the 24th book of the Iliad, and, strange to say, into the being and identity of the great poet himself. A doubt as to the genuineness of the 24th book of the Iliad had been expressed by Mr. Wakefield in his observations upon that most marvellous of all modern Pyrrhonisms, the famous dissertation of Bryant upon the siege of Troy; and we were not surprised on that occasion that the contagion of scepticism so congenial to our critic's mind, should have reached and infected him when in immediate contact and combat with the plague itself. Letter 9 seems to have been written about the same time with his observations on Mr. Bryant; and perhaps, all things considered, we might have permitted Mr. Wakefield huic uni-succumbere culpæ. The doubt is very ingeniously maintained on his part; though we must add also repelled with equal ingenuity and much good sense on the part of Mr. Fox; and we are only sorry that we cannot give both as a fair specimen of the respective critical powers of the writers. We must be satisfied with refering to letters 9 and 11; and proceed to state the second and more important delinquency of our critical, sceptic, which without preface we shall give in his own words from letter 9. pp. 27, 8, 9.

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"What is so well known with respect to every malefactor tied up at Newgate; (most detestable, flagitious practice! *) his birth, parentage, and education; life, character, and behaviour;' are all utterly unknown of Homer. We are at liberty, therefore, to frame any hypothesis for the solution of the problem concerning his poems, adequate to that effect, without danger of contravening authentic and established history. Now ὁμηρος is an old Greek word for τυφλος : see Hesych. and Lycophr. ver. 422. I take Homerus, then, to have originated in the peculiarity of a certain class of men (i. e. blindness), and not in that of an individual. That bards were usually blind, is not only probable, from the account of Demodocus in the Odyssey, but from the nature of things. The memory of blind men, because of a less distraction of their senses by external objects, is peculiarly tenacious; and such people had no means of obtaining a livelihood but by this occupation. All this is exemplified in fidlers, &c. at this day. Now the Trojan war (the first united achievement of the Greeks) would of course become a favourite theme with this class of men, who are known to have been very numerous. Detached portions of this event, such as the exploits of

What does this mean? Is this merely a poetical licence, or is it Mr. Wakefield's political liberty which abhors the cord and the drop, as nature does the vacuum which suspends all her choicest operations

:

Diomed, of Agamemnon, the Night Expedition, the Death of Hector, his redemption, &c. would be separately composed and sung, as fitted, by their lengths, for the entertainment of a company at one time and we find, in fact, that the parts of these poems are now distinguished, by scholiasts, grammarians, and all such writers, by these names, and not by books. These songs, bearing date demonstrably before the use of alphabetic characters in Greece, and when the dialect of the civilized parts of Asia (Ionia and Æolia) was uniform, could never be traced to their respective authors; and, in reality, we find from Herodotus, the first Greek historian, that no more was known of this Homer, nor so much, in his days (2, 3, 4, or 500 years after the event), as in our own. These songs of blind men were collected and put together by some skilful men (at the direction of Pisistratus, or some other person), and woven, by interpolations, connecting-verses, and divers modifications, into a whole. Hence paysia. Here we see a reason for so many repetitions: as every detached part, to be sung at an entertainment, required a head and tail piece, as necessary for an intelligible whole and hence we observe a reason for those unaccountable anomalies of measure, and the neglect of the Eolic digamma, from an ignorance of its power in those later times, whether from new insertions, or from alterations in the transmitted pieces, to effect regularity and consecution. This accounts also for the glaring disparity in some of the pieces; for nothing can be more exquisite than what you so justly admire, the interview of Priam and Achilles; and nothing more contemptible than the whole detail of the death of Hector, and reconciliation of Agamemnon and Achilles. You are expecting a noble exhibition of generosity and magnanimity on both sides, and you are put off with a miserable tedious ditty about Ate." P. 27.

Not being aware that Mr. Wakefield has announced this amusing conjecture in any of his own printed works, we are disposed to claim for him that indulgence which we ever think due to the character of an author, when suffering under the exercise of the very questionable right of posthumous exposure to the eyes of the public. But certainly we must say a more improbable story, we had almost said a keener burlesque upon the framers of hypotheses, has scarcely met our eye among all the extravagances of learned speculation.

"We are at liberty," says Mr. Wakefield, "to frame any hypothesis for the solution of the problem concerning his poems, adequate to that effect, without danger of contravening authentic history." But is there the slightest foundation in history for such an hypothesis? And is it not of the very essence of an hypothesis, that it must be founded upon some very strong, palpable, and indubitable facts or observations in the first instance, before it can even demand its trial in the solution of the pheno

VOL. V. NO. IX.

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mena for which it is to account? We have a feeling bordering on the ludicrous at the idea of a set of blind "fiddlers" exploring their way through all parts of Greece, cheering their own and their fellow countrymen's pov rog with magnificent descriptions of things and persons which some at least, we must suppose, never to have seen, and finding themselves, doubtless to the astonishment of all, suddenly aloft in the etherial regions of poetic inspiration, through a mere accident of nature; an accident, which in after ages has only, when combined with the native powers of an unparalleled genius, been able to produce one Milton. Whether any similar hypothesis founded on the appellative name of Mr. Wakefield's favourite, P. Ovidius Naso, may be hereafter presented to the public, may depend much on the success of that which this critic has so ingeniously founded on the loss of eyesight in the Oungo. We have certainly the misfortune to think this Homeric hypothesis unworthy of a serious confutation. The miracle is not that Homer's history has been lost, but that Homer's poems have been preserved. We never heard the history of that poet by Herodotus deemed fabulous, if indeed its genuineness may reasonably be doubted; and surely, if we take this history as a proof that little was known at that time of the actions of Homer, we must also equally admit it as a proof that something was known of his existence. As Mr. Wakefield has not supposed a similar obscurity as to the real authors of poems attributed to other ancient bards, as Orpheus, Ossian, &c. it would be superfluous in us to notice the inapplicableness of such examples; for whatever disputes have arisen as to the genuineness of their reputed productions, the most hardy sceptics have scarcely hinted a doubt as to their personal existence; and still less have they dreamt of erecting their individual names into those of a class or a clan of poets under that title. So that to Mr. Wakefield must be attributed the preeminent honour of one of the most unparalleled as well as most intrepid hypotheses that ever trifled with the common sense of mankind.

In letters 19, 20, 28, 29, 31, we find a reference made to a plan which Mr. Wakefield had in contemplation for a new Greek and English Dictionary; and it seems he had a store of 20,000 words, "words good and true," found in no common lexicon, to vindicate his claims on the gratitude of scholars, as a diligent lexicographer." One day with another," says he in p. 123, "I at least add twenty from my reading, for months together; some original words; the generality compounds." When we hear after this, in p. 179, that the plan of his lexicon was abandoned, we are naturally led to inquire with some curio

sity into whose hands the important catalogue of foundling words was consigned, and whether the public are ever to be called to take into its protection these houseless orphans. Perhaps, however, most of these words existing only in very obscure writers, "common" lexicographers have preferred the loss of some personal character for accuracy, to the much greater public inconvenience of overloaded lexicons. The uncommon, and such are generally the inferior, authors are perhaps best treated with annexed glossaries of their uncommon words; and glossaries of that kind might greatly facilitate philological research. An interesting plan is quoted in p. 126, by Mr. Fox, from the French academicians, for a chronological Lexicon; or a Lexicon giving an account of words in their original and afterwards their adscititious meanings, successively gained from various authors, arranged in chronological order. But a remark of Mr. Wakefield's, in p. 205, on the "learned and vigorous expressions of Ennius and Lucilius, and the old Roman comedians and tragedians," with a lamentation over their words, as being "marked inelegant and of suspicious authority in dictionaries," makes us suspect that pedantry would occasionally have triumphed over scholarship, and thus prevented a judicious selection or exposition of words in a new lexicon; though as etymologists we quite agree with our critic, that the loss of the old Roman poets, from the light which they would have thrown on the formation of the Latin language, and its derivation from the Æolian Greek, is a severe, if not the severest calamity ever sustained by philological learning.

Having been desirous of giving our readers some specimens of the critical powers of these two eminent correspondents, we have thought fit to confine ourselves to that object in the first instance, that we might not have afterwards to draw on an exhausted patience for attention to such dry discussions. But we find in this little volume, which we cannot but recommend as an interesting work to the classical scholar, the exercise of considerable literary taste, as well as of critical acumen.

It will have been seen already from Mr. Wakefield's summary sentence on "the miserable ditty on Atè" in Homer, (which occurs, II. 7. 91, et seq.) in which Mr. Fox "perfectly agrees," that their opinions on the merit of classic authors have been pretty freely expressed in this instance we are also inclined to add, unjustly: for the ditty on Atè, so far from making out satisfactorily to our conviction the spuriousness of that part of the Iliad which contains it, carries to our minds a very sufficient internal evidence of its belonging to the identical old minstrel, whose very

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