PROLEGOMENA. . ClU. 



the antient heathen poets, because the true re- 

 ligion got mixed up with their polytheism, the 

 effect of early intercourse with the children of 

 Israel ; but a close examination of all their poetry 

 will bear me out in what I have said. Horace's 

 most beautiful. Odes on the return of Spring, end 

 in a doleful retrospect of the spring of life for 

 ever past ; but the early catholic poets founded 

 on the same annual vicissitudes the finest pre- 

 sentiments of a spring eternal in heaven. In 

 the epic poets we can make similar comparisons : 

 and it is a curious fact, that the finest heroic 

 poetry of the antient Greeks, on which that of the 

 Romans was modelled, derives its whole ex^ 

 istence from the corruptions of the true histories 

 of the Jews, variously mixed up with fable, and 

 suited to the false religion of the people. The 

 story of Troy and its memorable siege I beheve 

 to be perfectly fabulous, for Father Guerrin de 

 Rocher, in his Terns Fabuleux, has clearly shown 

 that its very existence wants proof, and I believe 

 the whole of the Iliad is made up of the Song of 

 Deborah and the facts related in the Book of 

 Judges. But even if the whole history of the 

 Trojan war and rape of Helen were true, how 

 contemptible a subject is it compared with that 

 of Milton's Paradise Lost, or Tasso's Gerusa- 

 lemme Liberata. From Homer has Virffil taken 

 the hint of his Aeneid, equally full of fable and of 



