Part 6 (2/2)

{58} Both Thucydides and Livy are reprehensible in this particular; and the same objection may be made to Thua.n.u.s, Clarendon, Burnet, and many other modern historians.

{59} How just is this observation of Lucian's, and at the same time how truly poetical is the image which he makes use of to express it!

It puts us in mind of his rival critic Longinus, who, as Pope has observed, is himself the great sublime he draws.

{60} By this very just observation, Lucian means to censure all those writers--and we have many such now amongst us--who take so much pains to smooth and round their periods, as to disgust their readers by the frequent repet.i.tion of it, as it naturally produces a tiresome sameness in the sound of them; and at the same time discovers too much that laborious art and care, which it is always the author's business as much as possible to conceal.

{61} See Homer's ”Iliad,” bk. xiii., 1. 4.

{62a} The famous Lacedaemonian general. The circ.u.mstance alluded to is in Thucydides, bk. iv.

{62b} Gr. [Greek], a technical term, borrowed from music, and signifying that tone of the voice which exactly corresponds with the instrument accompanying it.

{66a} A coa.r.s.e fish that came from Pontus, or the Black Sea.-- Saperdas advehe Ponto. See Pers. Sat. v. 1. 134.

{66b} Here doctors differ. Several of Thucydides's descriptions are certainly very long, many of them, perhaps, rather tedious.

{67} Lucian is rather severe on this writer. Cicero only says, De omnibus omnia libere palam dixit; he spoke freely of everybody.

Other writers, however, are of the same opinion with our satirist with regard to him. See Dions. Plutarch. Cornelius Nepos, etc.

{69} Alluding to the story of Diogenes, as related in the beginning.

{75} See Homer's ”Odyssey.”--The strange stories which Lucian here mentions may certainly be numbered, with all due deference to so great a name, amongst the nugae canorae of old Homer. Juvenal certainly considers them in this light when he says:--

Tam vacui capitis populum Phaeaca putavit.

Some modern critics, however, have endeavoured to defend them.

{77} Here the history begins, what goes before may be considered as the author's preface, and should have been marked as such in the original.

{79} Among the Greek wines, so much admired by ancient Epicures, those of the islands of the Archipelago were the most celebrated, and of these the Chian wine, the product of Chios, bore away the palm from every other, and particularly that which was made from vines growing on the mountain called Arevisia, in testimony of which it were easy, if necessary, to produce an amphora full of cla.s.sical quotations.

The present inhabitants of that island make a small quant.i.ty of excellent wine for their own use and are liberal of it to strangers who travel that way, but dare not, being under Turkish government, cultivate the vines well, or export the product of them.

{81a} In the same manner as Gulliver's island of Laputa.--From this pa.s.sage it is not improbable but that Swift borrowed the idea.

{81b} The account which Lucian here gives us of his visit to the moon, perhaps suggested to Bergerac the idea of his ingenious work, called ”A Voyage to the Moon.”

{82a} Equi vultures, horse vultures; from [Greek], a horse: and [Greek], a vulture.

{82b} Lucian, we see, has founded his history on matter of fact.

Endymion, we all know, was a king of Elis, though some call him a shepherd. Shepherd or king, however, he was so handsome, that the moon, who saw him sleeping on Mount Latmos, fell in love with him.

This no orthodox heathen ever doubted: Lucian, who was a freethinker, laughs indeed at the tale; but has made him ample amends in this history by creating him emperor of the moon.

{83a} Modern astronomers are, I, think, agreed, that we are to the moon just the same as the moon is to us. Though Lucian's history may be false, therefore his philosophy, we see, was true (1780).

(The moon is not habitable, 1887.)

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