they would have themselves admired or recommended to the admiration of their posterity two poems, the main subject of one of which would appear to be nothing but a series of battles in a quarrel about an adulterous woman; and in the other of which, we find such stories as those of the Cyclops, of the Syrens, and of Circe and her swine but under a juster view of those poems, as framed upon some or all of the principles of disguise above mentioned, (and chiefly that of describing great things under the semblance of small,) we shall find in the Iliad all the different nations of Europe, (under much the same systems of policy as they are at present constituted,) engaged in a war for a great and legitimate object, in which war, through the medium of their colonies, all the rest of the world is involved, just as we see the course of events carried on in our days. Mr. Hume in one of his Essays* has fan * The passage alluded to is in the seventeenth essay of his first volume, entitled the Rise of Arts and Sciences, as follows: "Affairs are now returned nearly to the same cied a resemblance between the policy of the Grecian states, and that of the different nations of Europe. It is amusing to reflect how near he was to the truth in this notion, without hitting upon the reality: for the ancient writers did, in fact, under the disguise and cover of those little States, treat of the affairs and interests of the various countries of Europe at large; and as their subject necessarily brought into question the colonies belonging to those countries, it took its range by turns through every quarter of the globe. In a word it is utterly incredible to any situation as before, and Europe is at present a copy at large, of what Greece was formerly a pattern in miniature." *If the propositions advanced in the four or five preceding pages are only so many errors, they are now errors of somewhat long standing; for one of the dissertations mentioned in the preface to the first volume (the one in question, is dated Jan. 19, 1805,) contained the following statements, and I have since had occasion to doubt the truth of those statements. I have long since come to a clear conviction in my own body who reflects but for a moment, that so small a country as Greece, surrounded by the Turks, the mind, that the Greeks, the Romans, and the Egyptians, never were in truth such nations as we suppose them to have been; of which, as to the Romans in particular, Virgil gives a hint in his first Eclogue, 20, Urbem quam dicunt Romam, Melibae, putavi Stultus ego huic nostræ similem- and indeed I take the languages themselves of Greece and Rome to be no other than (the desiderata of the moderns) artificial universal languages, formed out of the different European languages as their foundations: the first being so framed at Athens (which city was never probably any thing more than an university, centrally situated between Europe, Asia, and Egypt in Africa), and so having the proper (or modern) Greek tongue for its main basis; and the second, the Latin, invented at Rome by the Catholic, or universal priesthood established there, and so formed upon the Italian (or the Spanish rather, perhaps,) as its principal basis: it follows from hence, that instead of saying that an English, French, or Italian word is derived from a Greek or Latin one, we ought in truth to say that the latter are derived from the former. Instances of affinity between Germans, the Anatolians, the Arabians, and the Africans (not to mention the Italians, the Spa the English and Latin languages must occur to every body very frequently; and to shew a like affinity between the English and the Greek, I shall copy fifty examples, as contained, but not very well selected, in an old book called Camden's Remains, p. 32. The author truly adds, that many more might be found, if a man would be idle enough to gather them;" and I shall premise what he says by way of introduction to them, as it is possible he might have intended to insinuate by it the same thing, as I have been more broadly stating. "If it be any glory," says he, "which the French and Dutch do brag of, that many words in their tongues do not differ from the Greeke, I can shew you as many in the English; whereof I will give you a few for a taste, as they have offered themselves in reading; but withal, I trust that you will not gather by consequence that we are descended from the Grecians. Who doth not see identity in these words, as if the one descended from the other? |