WEST OF ENGLAND JOURNAL 



OF 



No. II. APRIL, 1835, Vol. I. 



PART II.— LITERATURE. 



ESSAY ON THE WRITINGS OF HESIOD, 



PRINCIPALLY COMPILED FROM SOME MS. LECTURES DELIVERED AT OXFORD 

 BY THE REV. J. J. CONYBEARE, PROFESSOR OF POETRY. 



Communicated by his brother, the Rev. JV. D. Conybeare. 



ON THE THEOGONY.* 



C Continued from p. 11. J 



Amo.vg the Hesiodean remains of which we have in this article under- 

 taken the ilhistration, the Theogony of that poet may well claim our earliest 

 notice. Independently of the high poetical merit of many of the descrip- 

 tions and other embellishments which we shall find interwoven,t and even 

 making every allowance for much apparent inequality of original composi- 

 tion, and the many injuries which must have been sustained, as we have 

 already seen, in the course of a long memorial transmission through such 

 a channel as the oral recitations of rhapsodists, still there must ever re- 

 main one great argument which alone would render this piece of the highest 

 value and importance in the estimation of every student of Grecian poetry, 

 namely, its character as the richest original source of the whole poetical 

 mythology so intimately blended throughout almost every work of fancy 

 of that singular nation, ce.iaicaijwvt':f.poi, excessively addicted to their 

 wild superstitions in almost every verse they penned. Herodotus places 



• The original Lectures having been principally confined to poetical criticism, and 

 only touching very cursorily on Mythology, most of the observations in our present 

 article relating to that subject arc strictly original. 



t Especially the war of the Titans against Jupiter, doubly interesting to us as 

 having aflfordcd the prototype for much of our own Milton's war in heaven. 



No. II.— Vol. I. O* 



