In the works of the
two authors we may read their manners and inclinations, which are
wholly different. Virgil was of a quiet, sedate temper; Homer was
violent, impetuous, and full of fire. The chief talent of Virgil was
propriety of thoughts, and ornament of words; Homer was rapid in his
thoughts, and took all the liberties, both of numbers and of
expressions, which his language, and the age in which he lived, allowed
him: Homer's invention was more copious, Virgil's more confined; so
that if Homer had not led the way, it was not in Virgil to have begun
heroic poetry; for nothing can be more evident, than that the Roman
poem is but the second part of the _Ilias_; a continuation of the same
story, and the persons already formed; the manners of Aeneas are those
of Hector superadded to those which Homer gave him. The Adventures of
Ulysses in the _Odysseis_ are imitated in the first six books of
Virgil's _Aeneis_; and though the accidents are not the same (which
would have argued him of a servile copying, and total barrenness of
invention), yet the seas were the same in which both the heroes
wandered; and Dido cannot be denied to be the poetical daughter of
Calypso.
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