their absurdities; some the momentous vicissitudes of life, and some the lighter cccurrences; some the terrors of distress, and some the gaieties of prosperity. Thus rose the two modes of imitation, known by the names of tragedy and comedy, compositions intended to promote different ends by contrary means, and considered as so little allied, that I do not recollect among the Greeks or Romans a single writer who attempted both.

Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow, not only in one mind, but in one composition. Almost all his plays are divided between serious and ludicrous characters; and in the successive evolutions of the design, sometimes produce seriousness and sorrow, and sometimes levity and laughter.

That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because it includes both in its alternations of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by showing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and low co-operate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation. It is objected, that by this change of scenes the passions are interrupted in their progression, and that the principal event, being not advanced by a due graduation of preparatory incidents, wants at least the power to move, which constitutes the perfection of dramatic poetry. This reasoning is so specious that it is received as true even by those who in daily experience feel it to be false. The interchanges of mingled scenes seldom fail to produce the intended vicissitudes of passion. Fiction cannot move so much but that the attention may be easily transferred; and though it must be allowed that pleasing melancholy be sometimes interrupted by unwelcome levity, yet let it be considered that melancholy is often not pleasing, and that the disturbance of one man may be the relief of another; that different auditors have different habitudes; and that upon the whole, all pleasure consists in variety.

Preface to Johnson's edition of Shakespeare, 1765.

POPE'S TRANSLATION OF HOMER. The train of my disquisition has now conducted me to that poetical wonder, the translation of the "Iliad"; a performance which no age nor nation can pretend to equal. To the Greeks translation was almost unknown;

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it was totally unknown to the inhabitants of Greece. They had no resource to the barbarians for poetical beauties, but sought for everything in Homer, where, indeed, there is but little which they might not find. The Italians have been very diligent translators; but I can hear of no version, unless perhaps Anguillara's Ovid may be excepted, which is read with eagerness. The Iliad of Salvini every reader may discover to be punetiliously exact; but it seems to be the work of a linguist skilfully pedantic; and his countrymen, the proper judges of its power to please, reject it with disgust. Their predecessors, the Romans, have left some specimens of translation behind them, and that employment must have had some credit in which Tully and Germanicus engaged; but unless we suppose, what is perhaps true, that the plays of Terence were versions of Menander, nothing translated seems ever to have risen to high reputation. The French, in the meridian hour of their learning, were very laudably industrious to enrich their own language with the wisdom of the ancients; but found themselves reduced, by whatever necessity, to turn the Greek and Roman poetry into prose. Whoever could read an author could translate him. From such rivals little can be feared.

The chief help of Pope in this audacious undertaking was drawn from the versions of Dryden. Virgil had borrowed much of his imagery from Homer; and part of the debt was now paid back by the translator. Pope searched the pages of Dryden for happy combinations of heroic diction; but it will

not be denied that he added much to what he found. He cultivated our language with so much diligence and art that he has left in his "Ilomer" a treasure of poetical elegancies to posterity. His version may be said to have tuned the English tongue; for since its appearance no writer, however deficient in other powers, has wanted melody. Such a series of lines, so elaborately corrected, and so sweetly modulated, took possession of the public ear; the vulgar was enamoured of the poem, and the learned wondered at the translation. But in the most general applause discordant voices will always be heard. It has been objected by some, who wish to be numbered among the sons of learning, that Pope's version of Homer is not Homerical; that it exhibits no resemblance of the original and characteristic manner of the Father of Poetry, as it wants his artless grandeur, his unaf fected majesty.

[Bentley was one of these. He and Pope, soon after the publication of Homer, met at Dr. Mead's at dinner; when Pope, desirous of his opinion of the translation, addressed

This cannot be totally denied: but it must be remembered that necessitas quod cogit defendit that may be lawfully done which cannot be forborne. Time and place will always enforce regard. In estimating this translation consideration must be had of the nature of our language, the form of our metre, and, above all, of the change which two thousand years have made in the modes of life and the habits of thought. Virgil wrote in a language of the same general fabric with that of Homer, in verses of the same measure, and in age nearer to Homer's time by eighteen hundred years; yet he found, even then, the state of the world so much altered, and the demand for elegance so much increased, that mere nature would be endured no longer; and perhaps, in the multitude of borrowed passages, very few can be shown which he has not embellished. Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: Pope.

THOMAS REID, D.D., born 1710, was presented to the living of New Machar, Aberdeenshire, 1737, was Professor of Moral Philosophy in King's College, Aberdeen, 1752 to 1781, and died 1796. His best known works are Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Edin., 1785,4to, and Essays on the Active Powers of Man, Edin., 1788, 4to; both, Dubl., 1790, 3 vols. 8vo, and other editions. Sir William Hamilton published a portion of Reid's Writings, Lond. and Edin., 1846, 8vo, pp. 914, 5th edit., 1858, Svo, not completed in that shape, but superseded by The Works of Thomas Reid, D.D., now fully collected, etc., 6th edit., Edin., 1863, 2 vols. 8vo, pp. xxiii. 1034, 30s.; Supplementary Part, to complete former Editions, 1863, Svo, 58.

"The great aim of Reid's philosophy, then, was to investigate the true theory of perception; to controvert the representationalist hypothesis, as held in one sense or another by almost all preceding philosophers; and to stay the progress which scepticism, aided by this hypothesis, was so rapidly making. . . . That Reid has done much for the advancement of mental science is almost universally admitted: to complain that he did not accomplish more, or follow out the track which he opened to its furthest results, is perhaps unreason

Thomas Reid, a sincere inquirer after truth, who maintained the existence of certain principles of knowledge, independent of experience, and treated moral philosophy as the science of the other human mind, allowing it, however, no

foundation than that of Common Sense, or a species of Intellectual Instinct."- TENNEMANN: Manual of The Hist. of Philos., trans. by Johnson, Oxf., 1832, 382.

KNOWLEDGE OF THE MIND AND

ULTIES.

ITS FAC

Since we ought to pay no regard to hypothesis, and to be very suspicious of analogical reasoning, it may be asked, from what source must the knowledge of the mind and its faculties be drawn?

I answer, the chief and proper source of this branch of knowledge is accurate reflec tion upon the operations of our own minds. Of this source we shall speak more fully after making some remarks upon two others that may be subservient to it. The first of them is attention to the structure of language. The language of mankind is expressive of their thoughts, and of the various operations of their minds. The various operations of the understanding, will, and passions, which are common to mankind, have various forms of speech corresponding to them in all languages, which are the signs of them, and by which they are expressed: and a due attention to the signs may, in many cases, give considerable light to the things signified by them.

There are in all languages modes of speech by which men signify their judgment, or give their testimony; by which they accept or refuse; by which they ask information or advice; by which they command, or threaten, or supplicate; by which they plight their faith in promises or contracts. If such operations were not common to mankind, we should not find in all languages forms of speech by which they are expressed.

All languages, indeed, have their imperfections,-they can never be adequate to all the varieties of human thought; and therefore things may be really distinct in their nature, and capable of being distinguished by the human mind, which are not distinguished in common language. We can only expect in the structure of languages those distinctions which all mankind in the common business of life have occasion to make.

There may be peculiarities in a particular language of the causes of which we are ignorant, and from which, therefore, we can

authority than that of the immortal Tully. This noble author, in his dialogue concerning the celebrated Roman orators, frequently mentions it as a very high encomiumn, that they possessed the elegance of their native language; and introduces Brutus as declaring that he should prefer the honour of being esteemed the great master and improver of Roman eloquence, even to the glory of many triumphs.

But to add reason to precedent, and to view this art in its use as well as its dignity will it not be allowed of some importance, when it is considered that eloquence is one of the most considerable auxiliaries of truth? Nothing, indeed, contributes more to subdue the mind to the force of reason than her being supported by the powerful assistance of masculine and vigorous oratory. As, on the contrary, the most legitimate arguments may be disappointed of that science they deserve by being attended with a spiritless and enfeebled expression. Accordingly, that most elegant of writers, the inimitable Mr. Addison, observes, in one of his essays, that "There is as much difference between comprehending a thought clothed in Cicero's language and that of an ordinary writer, as between seeing an object by the light of a taper and the light of the sun."

It is surely then a very strange conceit of the celebrated Malebranche, who seems to think the pleasure which arises from perusing a well-written piece is of the criminal kind, and has its source in the weakness and effeminacy of the human heart. A man must have a very uncommon severity of temper indeed who can find anything to condemn in adding charms to truth, and gaining the heart by captivating the ear; in uniting roses with the thorns of science, and joining pleasure with instruction.

The truth is, the mind is delighted with a fine style upon the same principle that it prefers regularity to confusion, and beauty to deformity. A taste of this sort is indeed so far from being a mark of any depravity of our nature, that I should rather consider it as evidence, in some degree, of the moral rectitude of its constitution, as it is a proof of its retaining some relish at least of harmony and order.

One might be apt indeed to suspect that certain writers amongst us had considered all beauties of this sort in the same gloomy view with Malebranche: or, at least, that they avoided every refinement in style as unworthy a lover of truth and philosophy. Their sentiments are sunk by the lowest expressions, and seem condemned to the first curse of creeping upon the ground all the days of their life. Others, on the con

trary, mistake pomp for dignity; and, in order to raise their expressions above vulgar language, lift them up beyond common apprehensions, esteeming it (one should imagine) a mark of their genius that it requires some ingenuity to penetrate their meaning.

But how few writers, like Euphronius, know how to hit that true medium which lies between those distant extremes! How seldom do we meet with an author whose expressions, like those of my friend, are glowing but not glaring, whose metaphors are natural but not common, whose periods are harmonious but not poetical: in a word, whose sentiments are well set, and shown to the understanding in their truest and most advantageous lustre. Fitzosborne's Letters.

ON THE LOVE OF FAME.

I can by no means agree with you in thinking that the love of fame is a passion which either reason or religion condemns. I confess, indeed, there are some who have represented it as inconsistent with both; and I remember, in particular, the excellent author of The Religion of Nature Delineated has treated it as highly irrational and absurd. As the passage falls in so thoroughly with your own turn of thought, you will have no objection, I imagine, to my quoting it at large, and I give it you, at the same time, as a very great authority on your side. "In reality," says that writer, "the man is not known ever the more to posterity because his name is transmitted to them: he doth not live because his name does. When it is said Julius Cæsar subdued Gaul, conquered Pompey, &c., it is the same thing as to say, The conqueror of Pompey was Julius Cæsar, i.e., Cæsar and the conqueror of Pompey is the same thing; Cæsar is as much known by one designation as by the other. The amount then is only this: that the conqueror of Pompey conquered Pompey; or, rather, since Pompey is as little known now as Cæsar, somebody conquered somebody. Such a poor business is this boasted immortality! and such is the thing called glory among us! To discerning men this fame is mere air; and what they despise, if not shun."

But surely Twere to consider too curously," as Horatio says to Hamlet, "to consider thus." For though fame with posterity should be, in the strict analysis of it, no other than that what is here described, a mere uninteresting proposition amounting to nothing more than that somebody acted meritoriously, yet it would not necessarily follow that true philosophy would banish the desire of it from the human breast. For this