curs in an ode on the birth of a prince of the blood royal: Où suis-je ? quel nouveau miracle Je vois des demeures divines J. B. ROUSESAU.-Ode on the Birth of the Duke of Bretagne. Here we find the poet's senses enchanted and alarmed at the appearance of a prodigy-a vast and magnificent spectacle-a new birth, which is to reform the universe, and redeem it from a state of chaos, &c. all which means simply that a male child is born to the house of Bourbon. This is as bad as, "Je chante les vainqueurs, des vainqueurs de la terre." We will avail ourselves of the present opportunity to observe, that there is a very small portion of enthusiasm in the Ode on the Taking of Namur. ENVY. We all know what the ancients said of this disgraceful passion, and what the moderns have repeated. Hesiod is the first classic author who has spoken of it. "The potter envies the potter, the artisan the artisan, the poor even the poor, the musician the musician, (or, if any one chuses to give a different meaning to the word avidos) the poet the poet." Long before Hesiod, Job had remarked, "Envy destroys the little-minded.” I believe Mandeville, the author of the Fable of the Bees, is the first who has endeavoured to prove that envy is a very good thing, a very useful passion. His first reason is, that envy was natural to man as hunger and thirst; that it may be observed in all children, as well as in horses and dogs. If you wish your children should hate one another, caress one more than the other; the prescription is infallible. He asserts, that the first thing two young women do when they meet together, is to discover matter for ridicule, and the second to flatter each other. He thinks that without envy the arts would be only moderately cultivated, and that Raphael would never have been a great painter if he had not been jealous of Michael Angelo. Mandeville, perhaps, mistook emulation for envy; perhaps also emulation is nothing but envy restricted within the bounds of decency. Michael Angelo might say to Raphael, your envy has only induced you to study and execute still better than I do; you have not depreciated me, you have not caballed against me before the pope, you have not endeavoured to get me excommunicated for placing in my picture of the Last Judgment one-eyed and lame persons in paradise, and pampered cardinals with beautiful women perfectly naked in hell! No; your envy is a laudable feeling; you are brave as well as envious; let us be good friends. But if the envious person is an unhappy being without talents, jealous of merit as the poor are of the rich; if under the pressure at once of indigence and baseness he writes "News from Parnassus,' "Letters from a celebrated Countess," or Literary Annals," the creature displays an envy which is in fact absolutely good for nothing, and for which even Mandeville could make no apology. 66 Descartes said, "that envy forces up the yellow bile from the lower part of the liver, and the black bile that comes from the spleen, which diffuses itself from the heart by the arteries," &c. But as no species of bile is formed in the spleen, Descartes, when he spoke thus, deserved not to be envied for his physiology. A person of the name of Poet or Poetius, a theological blackguard, who accused Descartes of atheism, was exceedingly affected by the black bile. But he knew still less than Descartes how his detestable bile circulated through his blood. Madame Pernell is perfectly right :— Les envieux mourront, mais non jamais l'envie. The envious will die, but envy never. Tartuffe, act v. scene 3. That it is better to excite envy than pity, is a good proverb. Let us, then, make men envy us as much as we are able. EPIC POETRY. SINCE the word epos, among the Greeks, signified a discourse, an epic poem must have been a discourse: and it was in verse, because it was not the custom then to write in prose. This appears strange, but it is no less true. One Pherecides is supposed to have been the first Greek who made exclusive use of prose to compose one of those half-true half-false histories so common to antiquity. * Orpheus, Linus, Thamyris, and Musæus, the predecessors of Homer, wrote in verse only. Hesiod, who was certainly contemporary with Homer, wrote his Theogony and his poem of "Works and Days" entirely in verse. The harmony of the Greek language so invited men to poetry, a maxim turned into verse was so easily engraved on the memory, that the laws, oracles, morals, and theology, were all composed in verse. Of Hesiod. He made use of fables, which had for a long time been received in Greece. It is clearly seen by the succinct manner in which he speaks of Prometheus and Epimetheus, that he supposes these notions already familiar to all the Greeks. He only mentions them to show that it is necessary to labour, and that an indolent repose, in which other mythologists have made the felicity of man to consist, is a violation of the orders of the Supreme Being. · Hesiod afterwards describes the four famous ages, of which he is the first who has spoken, at least among the ancient authors who remain to us. The first age is that which preceded Pandora,-the time in which men lived with the gods. The iron age, is that of the siege of Thebes and Troy. "I live in the fifth," says * Half true! that is a great deal,-French Ed. VOL. III. K he," and I would I had never been born." How many men, oppressed by envy, fanaticism, and tyranny, since Hesiod, have said the same! It is in this poem of "Works and Days" that those proverbs are found which have been perpetuated: as"the potter is jealous of the potter," and he adds, "the musician of the musician, and the poor even of the poor." We there find the original of our fable of the nightingale fallen into the claws of the vulture. The nightingale sings in vain to soften him; the vulture devours her. Hesiod does not conclude that a hungry belly has no ears, but that tyrants are not to be mollified by genius. A hundred maxims worthy of Xenophon and Cato are to be found in this poem. Men are ignorant of the advantage of society: they know not that the half is more valuable than the whole. Iniquity is pernicious only to the powerless. Equity alone causes cities to flourish. One unjust man is often sufficient to ruin his country. The wretch who plots the destruction of his neighbour, often prepares the way to his own. The road to crime is short and easy. That of virtue is long and difficult; but towards the end it is delightful. God has placed labour as a sentinel over virtue. Lastly, his precepts on agriculture were worthy to be imitated by Virgil. There are also very fine passages in his Theogony. Love, who disentangles chaos; Venus, born of the sea from the genital parts of a god nourished on earth, always followed by Love, and uniting heaven, earth, and sea, are admirable emblems. Why then has Hesiod had less reputation than Homer? They seem to me of equal merit; but Homer has been preferred by the Greeks, because he sung their exploits and victories over the Asiatics, their eternal enemies. He celebrated all the families which in his time reigned in Achaia and Peloponessus; he wrote the most memorable war of the first people in Europe against the most flourishing nation which was then known in Asia. His poem was almost the only monument of that great epoch. There was no town or family which did not think itself honoured by having its name mentioned in these records of valour. We are even assured that a long time after him some differences between the Greek towns on the subject of adjacent lands were decided by the verses of Homer. He became, after his death, the judge of cities, in which it is pretended that he asked alms during his life; which proves, also, that the Greeks had poets long before they had geographers. It is astonishing that the Greeks, so disposed to honour epic poems which immortalised the combats of their ancestors, produced no one to sing the battles of Marathon, Thermopylæ, Platea, and Salamis. The heroes of these times were much greater men than Agamemnon, Achilles, and Ajax. Tyrtæus, a captain, poet, and musician, like the king of Prussia in our days, made war and sang it. He animated the Spartans against the Messenians by his verses, and gained the victory. But his works aré lost. It does not appear that any epic poem was written in the time of Pericles. The attention of genius was turned towards tragedy; so that Homer stood alone, and his glory increased daily. We now come to his Iliad. Of the Iliad. What confirms me in the opinion that Homer was of the Greek colony established at Smyrna, is the oriental style of all his metaphors and pictures: The earth which shook under the feet of the army when it marched like the thunderbolts of Jupiter on the hills which overwhelmed the giant Typhon; a wind blacker than night winged with tempests; Mars and Minerva followed by Terror, Flight, and insatiable Discord, the sister and companion of Homicide, the god of battles, who raises tumults wherever she appears, and who, not content with setting the world by the ears, even exalts her proud head into heaven. The Iliad is full of these images, which caused the sculptor Bouchardon |