countries denominated christian, that so many who profess to adopt it never once thought of guarding their own minds, and those of their children, against the eloquent seductions of so opposite a spirit. Probably they would be more intelligent and vigilant, if any other interest than that of their professed religion were endangered. But a thing which injures them only in that concern, is sure to meet with all possible indulgence.

With respect to religious parents and preceptors, whose children and pupils are to receive that liberal education which must inevitably include the study of these great works, it will be for them to accompany the youthful readers throughout, with an effort to show them, in the most pointed manner, the inconsistency of many of the sentiments, both with moral rectitude in general, and with the special dictates of christianity. And in order to give the requisite force to those dictates, it will be an important duty to illustrate to them the amiable tendency, and to prove the awful authority, of this dispensation of religion. This careful effort will often but partially prevent the mischief; but it seems to be all that can be done.

Virgil's work is a kind of lunar reflection of the ardent effulgence of Homer; surrounded, if I may extend the figure, with a beautiful halo of elegance and tenderness. So much more refined an order of sentiment might have rendered the heroic character far more attractive, to a mind that can soften as well as glow, if there had actually been a hero in the poem. But none of the personages intended for heroes take hold enough of the reader's feelings to assimilate them in moral temper. No fiction or history of human characters and actions will ever powerfully transfuse its spirit, without some one or some very few individuals

of signal peculiarity or greatness, to concentrate and embody the whole energy of the work. There would be no danger therefore of any one's becoming an idolater of the god of war through the inspiration of the Æneid, even if a larger proportion of it had resounded with martial enterprise. Perhaps the chief counteraction to christian sentiments which I should apprehend to an opening susceptible mind, would be a depravation of its ideas concerning the other world, from the picturesque scenery which Virgil has opened to his hero in the regions of the dead, and the imposing images with which he has shaded the avenue to them. Perhaps also the affecting sentiments which precede the death of Dido, might tend to lessen, especially in a pensive mind, the horror of that impiety which would throw back with violence the possession of life, as if in reproach to its great Author, for having suffered that there should be unhappiness in a world where there is sin.

LETTER VI.

IN naming Lucan, I am not unaware that an avowal of high admiration may hazard all credit for correct discernment. I must, however, confess that, in spite of his rhetorical ostentation, and all the offences of a too inflated style, he does in my apprehension greatly surpass all the other ancient poets in direct force of the ethical spirit; and that he would have a stronger influence to seduce my feelings, in respect to moral greatness, into a discordance from christian principles. His leading characters are widely different from those of Homer, and of an eminently superior order. The mighty genius of Homer appeared and departed in a

rude age of the human mind, a stranger to the intellectual enlargement which would have enabled him to combine in his heroes the dignity of thought, instead of mere physical force, with the energy of passion. For want of this, they are great heroes without being great men. They appear to you only as tremendous fighting and destroying animals; a kind of human mammoths. The prowess of personal conflict is all they can understand and admire, and in their warfare their minds never reach to any of the sublimer views and results even of war; their chief and final object seems to be the mere savage glory of fighting, and the annihilation of their enemies. When the heroes of Lucan, both the depraved and the nobler class, are employed in war, it seems but a small part of what they can do, and what they intend; they have always something further and greater in view than to evince their valour, or to riot in the vengeance of victory. Ambition as exhibited in Pompey and Cæsar seems almost to become a grand passion, when compared to the contracted and ferocious aim of Homer's chiefs; while this passion, even thus elevated, serves to exalt by comparison the far different and nobler sentiments and objects of Cato and Brutus. The contempt of death, which in the heroes of the Iliad often seems like an incapacity or an oblivion of thought, is in Lucan's favourite characters the result, or at least the associate, of high philosophic spirit; and this strongly contrasts their courage with that of Homer's warriors, which is, (according indeed to his own frequent similes,) the reckless daring of wild beasts. Lucan sublimates martial into moral grandeur. Even if you could deduct from his great men all that which forms the specific martial display of the hero, you would find their greatness little diminished; they would still retain their

commanding and interesting aspect. The better class of them, amidst war itself, hate and deplore the spirit and destructive exploits of war. They are indignant at the vices of mankind for compelling their virtue into a career in which such sanguinary glories can be acquired. And while they deem it their duty to exert their courage in conflict for a just cause, they regard camps and battles as vulgar things, from which their thoughts often turn away into a train of solemn and presaging reflections, in which they approach sometimes the most elevated sublimity. You have a more absolute impression of grandeur from a speech of Cato, than from all the mighty exploits that epic poetry ever blazoned. The eloquence of Lucan's moral heroes does not consist in images of triumphs and conquests, but in reflections on virtue, sufferings, destiny, and death; and the sentiments expressed in his own name have often a melancholy tinge which renders them irresistibly interesting. He might seem to have felt a presage, while musing on the last of the Romans, that their poet was soon to follow them. The reader becomes devoted both to the poet, and to these illustrious men; but, under the influence of this attachment, he adopts all their sentiments, and exults in the sympathy; forgetting, or unwilling, to reflect, whether this state of feeling be concordant with the religion of Christ, and with the spirit of the apostles and martyrs. The most captivating of Lucan's sentiments, to a mind enamoured of pensive sublimity, are those concerning death. I remember the very principle which I would wish to inculcate, that is, the necessity that a believer of the gospel should preserve the christian tenour of feeling predominant in his mind, and clear of incongruous mixture, having struck me with great force amidst the enthusiasm with which I read many times over the

memorable account of Vulteius, the speech by which he inspired his gallant band with a passion for death, and the reflections on death with which the poet closes the episode. I said to myself, at the suggestion of conscience, What are these sentiments with which I am glowing? Are these the just ideas of death? Are they such as were taught by the Divine Author of our religion? Is this the spirit with which St. Paul approached his last hour? And I felt a painful collision between this reflection and the passion inspired by the poet. I perceived clearly that the kind of interest which I felt was no less than a real adoption, for the time, of the very same sentiments with which he was animated.

The epic poetry has been selected for the more pointed application of my remarks, from the belief that it has had a much greater influence on the moral sentiments of succeeding ages than all the other poetry of antiquity, by means of its impressive display of individual great characters. And it will be admitted that the moral spirit of the epic poets, taken together, is as little in opposition to the christian theory of moral sentiments as that of the collective poetry of other kinds. Some just and fine sentiments to be found in the Greek tragedies are in the tone of the best of the pagan didactic moralists. And they infuse themselves more intimately into our minds when thus coming warm in the course of passion and action, and speaking to us with the emphasis imparted by affecting and dreadful events; but still are of less vivid and penetrating charm, than as emanating from the insulated magnificence of such striking and sublime individual characters as those of epic poetry. The mind of the reader does not, from those dramatic scenes, retain for months and years an animated recollection of some personage whose name