us the history of a thousand minute points, without which our Greek knowledge

would be gloomy and jejune.


But it is not on words only that grammarians, mere grammarians, will exercise

their elaborate and often tiresome ingenuity. Binding down an heroic or

dramatic poet to the block upon which they have previously dissected his words

and sentences, they proceed to use the axe and the pruning knife by wholesale;

and, inconsistent in everything but their wish to make out a case of unlawful

affiliation, they cut out book after book, passage after passage, till the

author is reduced to a collection of fragments, or till those who fancied they

possessed the works of some great man, find that they have been put off with a

vile counterfeit got up at second hand. If we compare the theories of Knight,

Wolf, Lachmann; and others, we shall feel better satisfied of the utter

uncertainty of criticism than of the apocryphal position of Homer. One rejects

what another considers the turning-point of his theory. One cuts a supposed

knot by expunging what another would explain by omitting something else.


Nor is this morbid species of sagacity by any means to be looked upon as a

literary novelty. Justus Lipsius, a scholar of no ordinary skill, seems to

revel in the imaginary discovery, that the tragedies attributed to Seneca are

by four different authors. Now, I will venture to assert, that these

tragedies are so uniform, not only in their borrowed phraseology—a

phraseology with which writers like Boethius and Saxo Grammaticus were more

charmed than ourselves—in their freedom from real poetry, and last, but

not least, in an ultra-refined and consistent abandonment of good taste, that

few writers of the present day would question the capabilities of the same

gentleman, be he Seneca or not, to produce not only these, but a great many

more equally bad. With equal sagacity, Father Hardouin astonished the world