ON CERTAIN INCONSIDERATE CRITICISMS. 237 



sition, to canonize Gildon, Oldmixon, and the other heroes of Grub- 

 street, who are 



** Damned to everlasting fame,'* 



in the pillory of Pope's satirical castigation. Are we, therefore, to 

 prefer those wretched ballad-mongers and libellers in prose, to Myron, 

 Phidias and Lysippus ; to Apelles, Zeuxis, Parrhasius.. and all their 

 great rivals and contemporaries ? But from this alleged inferiority 

 or disadvantage, the most inspired poetry is not free. Certainly, ac- 

 cording to Boswell's confined view of this subject, we must know 

 that there is such an animal as a horse — such weapons as swords, 

 spears, shields, helmets, and other defensive armour, before we can 

 understand the battles of Homer and Virgil, or those of Constantine 

 painted by Julio Romano, from Raffaelle's design ; or of the same 

 emperor, by Rubens. If the Iliad and JEneid had been translated 

 into the Mexican language, prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, 

 the Mexicans, who had never seen a horse in their country, would 

 have required information to understand the passages in which those 

 animals are introduced. I lay very little stress on this isolated sup- 

 position, but merely as it instances that every object in nature and 

 art, which men have not seen, and of which they are ignorant, are 

 liable to be misunderstood in poetry, and require an interpreter. 

 The most sublime parts of Milton's Paradise Lost — those in which 

 the Deity is introduced, and the war of the Angels with Lucifer and 

 his host — would be wholly unintelligible if we had not the mosaic 

 history for our guide, and even with the information derived 

 from that sacred authority, much of that noble poem must, from the 

 super-human nature of the subject, for ever remain a mystery to the 

 general mass of readers. 



Although epic poetry is a vivid description of general nature, 

 which exercises an almost supreme dominion over the mind of those 

 in whose native tongue it is written, it does not speak an universal 

 language. Without a translation, those two sublime productions 

 of the Grecian and Latin muses already mentioned, would be un- 

 derstood only by the learned few. There must be as many transla- 

 tions as there are nations in the universe, to make them everywhere 

 understood. The fact, that much of the force and meaning of an 



