is nothing but envy restricted within the bounds of decency.

Michael Angelo might say to Raphael, your envy has only induced you to study and execute still better than I do; you have not depreciated me, you have not caballed against me before the pope, you have not endeavoured to get me excommunicated for placing in my picture of the Last Judgment one-eyed and lame persons in paradise, and pampered cardinals with beautiful women perfectly naked in hell! No! your envy is a laudable feeling; you are brave as well as envious; let us be good friends.

EPIC POETRY.

SINCE the word epos, among the Greeks, signified a discourse, an epic poem must have been a discourse: and it was in verse, because it was not then the custom to write in prose. This appears strange, but it is no less true. One Pherecides is supposed to have been the first Greek who made exclusive use of prose to compose one of those halftrue, half-false histories so common to antiquity.

Orpheus, Linus, Thamyris, and Musæus, the predecessors of Homer, wrote in verse only. Hesiod, who was certainly contemporary with Homer, wrote

But if the envious person is an unhappy being without talents, jealous of merit as the poor are of the rich; if un-his Theogony and his poem of "Works der the pressure at once of indigence and baseness he writes "News from Parnassus," "Letters from a celebrated Countess," or "Literary Annals," the creature displays an envy which is in fact absolutely good for nothing, and for which even Mandeville could make no apology.

and Days" entirely in verse. The harmony of the Greek language so invited men to poetry, a maxim turned into verse was so easily engraved on the memory, that the laws, oracles, morals, and theology, were all composed in

verse.

Of Hesiod.

Descartes said, "that envy forces up the yellow bile from the lower part of the He made use of fables, which had for liver, and the black bile that comes from a long time been received in Greece. It the spleen, which diffuses itself from the is clearly seen by the succinct manner heart by the arteries," &c. But as no in which he speaks of Prometheus and species of bile is formed in the spleen, Epimetheus, that he supposes these noDescartes, when he spoke thus, de- tions already familiar to all the Greeks. served not to be envied for his phy-He only mentions them to show that it siology.

A person of the name of Poet or Poetius, a theological blackguard, who accused Descartes of atheism, was exceedingly affected by the black bile. But he knew still less than Descartes how his detestable bile circulated through his blood.

Madame Pernell is perfectly right:

Les envieux mourront, mais nun jamais l'envie.
The envious will die, but envy never.

:

is necessary to labour, and that an indolent repose, in which other mythologists have made the felicity of man to consist,

is a violation of the orders of the Supreme Being.

Hesiod afterwards describes the four

famous ages, of which he is the first who has spoken, at least among the ancient authors who remain to us. The first age is that which preceded Pandora,the time in which men lived with the gods. The iron age, is that of the siege of Thebes and Troy. "I live in the fifth," says he, “and I would I had never been born." How many men, oppressed by envy, fanaticism, and ty ranny, since Hesiod, have said the same!

It is in this poem of "Works and Days" that those proverbs are found which have been perpetuated: as "the potter is jealous of the potter," and he adds, "the musician of the musician, and the poor even of the poor." We there find the original of our fable of the nightingale fallen into the claws of the vulture. The nightingale sings in vain to soften him; the vulture devours her. Hesiod does not conclude that a hungry belly has no ears, but that tyrants are not to be mollified by genius.

in Asia. His poem was almost the only monument of that great epoch. There was no town or family which did not think itself honoured by having its name mentioned in these records of valour. We are even assured that a long time after him some differences between the Greek towns on the subject of adjacent lands were decided by the verses of HoHe became, after his death, the judge of cities, in which it is pretended that he asked alms during his life; which proves, also, that the Greeks had poets A hundred maxims worthy of Xeno-long before they had geographers. phon and Cato are to be found in this poem.

Men are ignorant of the advantage of society they know not that the half is more valuable than the whole.

Iniquity is pernicious only to the powerless.

Equity alone causes cities to flourish. One unjust man is often sufficient to ruin his country.

The wretch who plots the destruction of his neighbour, often prepares the way to his own.

The road to crime is short and easy. That of virtue is long and difficult; but towards the end it is delightful.

God has placed labour as a sentinel over virtue,

Lastly, the precepts on agriculture were worthy to be imitated by Virgil. There are, also, very fine passages in his Theogony. Love, who disentangles chaos; Venus, born of the sea from the genital parts of a god nourished on earth, always followed by Love, and uniting heaven, earth, and sea, are admirable emblems,

mer.

It is astonishing that the Greeks, so disposed to honour epic poems which immortalised the combats of their ancestors, produced no one to sing the battles of Marathon, Thermopylæ, Platea, and Salamis. The heroes of these times were much greater men than Agamemnon, Achilles, and Ajax.

Tyrtæus, a captain, poet, and musician, like the King of Prussia in our days, made war and sang it. He animated the Spartans against the Messenians by his verses, and gained the victory. But his works are lost. It does not appear that any epic poem was written in the time of Pericles. The attention of genius was turned towards tragedy; so that Homer stood alone, and his glory increased daily. We now come to his Iliad.

Of the Iliad."

What confirms me in the opinion that Homer was of the Greek colony established at Smyrna, is the oriental style of all his metaphors and pictures :-The earth which shook under the feet of the army when it marched like the thunderbolts of Jupiter on the hills which overwhelmed the giant Typhon; a wind blacker than night winged with tempests; Mars and Minerva followed by Terror,

Why, then, has Hesiod had less reputation than Homer? They seem to me of equal merit; but Homer has been preferred by the Greeks, because he sung their exploits and victories over the Asiatics, their eternal enemies. He cele-Flight, and insatiable Discord, the sisbrated all the families which in his time reigned in Achaia and Peloponessus; he wrote the most memorable war of the first people in Europe against the most flourishing nation which was then known

ter and companion of Homicide, the god of battles, who raises tumults wherever she appears, and who, not content with setting the world by the ears, even exalts her proud head into heaven. The

Iliad is full of these images, which caused the sculptor Bouchardon to say, "When I read Homer, I believe myself twenty feet high."

His poem, which is not at all interesting to us, was very precious to the Greeks. His gods are ridiculous to reasonable but they were not so to partial eyes, and it was for partial eyes that he wrote.

We laugh and shrug up our shoulders at these gods, who abused one another, fought one another, and combatted with men-who were wounded, and whose blood flowed: but such was the ancient theology of Greece and of almost all the Asiatic people. Every nation, every little village, had its particular god, which conducted it to battle.

Homer has great faults: Horace confesses it, and all men of taste agree to it : there is only one commentator, who is blind enough not to see them. Pope, who was himself a translator of the Greek poet, says, "That it is a vast but uncultivated country, where we meet with all kinds of natural beauties, but which do not present themselves as regularly as in a garden; that it is an abundant nursery, which contains the seeds of all fruits; a great tree, that extends superfluous branches, which it is necessary to prune.'

Madame Dacier sides with the vast The inhabitants of the clouds, and of country, the nursery, and the tree, and the stars which were supposed in the would have nothing curtailed. She was clouds, had a cruel war. The combat of no doubt a woman superior to her sex, the angels against one another, was from and has done great service to letters, as time immemorial the foundation of the well as her husband; but when she be religion of the Bramins. The battle of came masculine and turned commentator, the Titans, the children of heaven and she so overacted her part, that she piqued earth, against the chief gods of Olympus, people into finding fault with Homer. was also the leading mystery of the Greek She was so obstinate as to quarrel even religion. Typhon, according to the Egyp-with Monsieur de la Motte. She wrote tians, had fought against Oshiret, whom we call Osiris, and cut him to pieces. Madame Dacier, in her preface to the Iliad, remarks very sensibly, after Eustatius, Bishop of Thessalonica, and Huet, Bishop of Avranches, that every neighbouring nation of the Hebrews had its god of war. Indeed, does not Jepthah? say to the Ammonites, "Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee to possess? So, whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive out from before us, from them will we possess." Do we not see the God of Judah a' conqueror in the mountains and repulsed in the vallies?

As to men wrestling against divinities, that is a received idea. Jacob wrestled one whole night with an angel. If Jupiter sent a deceiving dream to the chief of the Greeks, the Lord also sent a deceiving spirit to King Ahab. These emblems were frequent, and astonished

against him like the head of a college, and La Motte answered like a polite and witty woman. He translated the Iliad very badly; but he attacked Madame § Dacier very well.

We will not speak of the Odyssey here; we shall say something of that poem while treating of Ariosto.

Of Virgil.

It appears to me that the second, fourth, and sixth books of the Æneid are as much above all Greek and Latin poets, without exception, as the statues of Girardon are superior to all those which preceded them in France.

It is often said that Virgil has borrowed many of the figures of Homer, and that he is even inferior to him in his imitations; but he has not imitated him at all in the three books of which I am speaking-he is there himself touching and appalling to the heart. Perhaps he was

and said nothing about it. We should be just.

neither misplaced nor far-fetched. It is at once the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Don Quixote; for his principal knight-errant becomes mad like the Spanish hero, and is infinitely more pleasant.

We recal the reader's memory to what has been said of Tasso in the Essay on Epic Poetry; but we must here observe that his verses are known by heart all over Italy. If at Venice any one in a boat sings a stanza of the Jerusalem Delivered, he is answered from a neigh-so much in fashion with us, and which bouring bark with the following one.

The subject of the poem which consists of so many things, is precisely that of the romance of Cassandra, which was formerly

has entirely lost its celebrity, because it If Boileau had listened to these con- had only the length of the Orlando Fucerts, he could have said nothing in rioso, and few of its beauties; and even reply. the few being in French prose: five or As enough is known of Tasso, I will six stanzas of Ariosto will eclipse them not repeat here either eulogies or criti-all. His poem closes with the greater cisms: I will speak more at length of Ariosto.

Of Ariosto.

part of the heroes and princesses, who have not perished during the war, all meeting in Paris, after a thousand adventures; just as the personages in the ro{mance of Cassandra all finally meet again in the house of Palemon.

The Orlando Furioso possesses a merit

Homer's Odyssey seems to have been the first model of the Morgante, of the Orlando Innamorata and the Orlando Furioso; and, what very seldom hap-unknown to the ancients-it is that of its pens, the last of the poems is without dispute the best.

exordiums. Every canto is like an enchanted palace, the vestibule of which is always in a different taste-sometimes majestic, sometimes simple, and even grotesque. It is moral, lively, or gallant, and always natural and true.

EPIPHANY:

The companions of Ulysses changed into swine; the winds shut up in goats' skins; the musicians with fishes' tails, who ate all those who approached them; Ulysses, who followed the chariot of a beautiful princess who went to bathe quite naked; Ulysses, disguised as a beggar, who asked alms, and afterwards killed all The Manifestation, the Appearance, the the lovers of his aged wife, assisted only by his son and two servants-are imaginations which have given birth to all the poetical romances which have since been written in the same style.

Illustration, the Radiance.

Ir is not easy to perceive what relation this word can have to the three kings or magi, who came from the east under the guidance of a star. That brilliant star But the romance of Ariosto is so full was evidently the cause of bestowing on of variety, and so fertile in beauties of all the day of its appearance the denominakinds, that after having read it once quite{tion of the Epiphany. through, I only wish to begin it again. How great the charm of natural poetry! I never could read a single canto of this poem in a prose translation.

That which above all charms me in this wonderful work is, that the author is always above his subject, and treats it playfully. He says the most sublime things without effort, and he often finishes them by a turn of pleasantry which is

It is asked, whence came these three {kings? What place had they appointed for their rendezvous? One of them, it is said, came from Africa: he did not, then, come from the east. It is said they were three magi; but the common people have always preferred the interpretation of three kings. The feast of the kings is everywhere celebrated, but that of the magi nowhere: people eat king's-cake,