THE COMHENTATORIAL SPIRIT. 203 



dying Aristotle or Piato. Moreover, a large portion of this employment 

 is of a kind the most agreeable to most speculative minds ; it consists 

 in tracing the consequences of assumed principles : it is deductive like 

 geometry : and the principles of the teachers being known, and being 

 undisputed, the deduction and application of their results is an obvious, 

 self-satisfying, and inexhaustible exercise of ingenuity. 



These causes, and probably others, make criticism and commentation 

 nourish, when invention begins to fail, oppressed and bewildered by 

 the acquisitions it has already made ; and when the vigor and hope of 

 men's minds are enfeebled by civil and political changes. Accordingly, 1 

 the Alexandrian school was eminently characterized by a spirit of 

 erudition, of literary criticism, of interpretation, of imitation. These 

 practices, which reigned first in their full vigor in "the Museum," are 

 likely to be, at all times, the leading propensities of similar academical 

 institutions. 



How natural it is to select a great writer as a paramount authority, 

 and to ascribe to him extraordinary profundity and sagacity, we may 

 see, in the manner in which the Greeks looked upon Homer ; and the 

 fancy which detected in his poems traces of the origin of all aits and 

 sciences, has, as we know, found favor even in modern times. To pass 

 over earlier instances of this feeling, we may observe, that Strabo begins 

 his Geography by saying that he agrees with llipparchus, who had 

 declared Homer to be the first author of our geographical knowledge ; 

 and he does not confine the application of this assertion to the various 

 and curious topographical information which the Iliad and Odyssej 

 contain, concerning the countries surrounding the Mediterranean ; but 

 in phrases which, to most persons, might appear the mere play of a 

 poetical fancy, or a casual selection of circumstances, he finds unques- 

 tionable evidence of a correct knowledge of general geographical 

 truths. Thus, 2 when Homer speaks of the sun " rising from the soft 

 and deep-flowing ocean," of his " splendid blaze plunging in the ocean ;" 

 of the northern constellation 



" Alone unwashen by the ocean wave ;" 



and of Jupiter, " who goes to the ocean to feast with the blameless 

 Ethiopians ;" Strabo is satisfied from these passages that Homer knew 

 the dry land to be surrounded with water : and he reasons in like 

 manner with respect to other points of geography. 



1 Degerando, Hist, des Syst. de P/iilos. iii. p. 134. s Strabo, i. p. 5. 



