It must have been very pleasant to have seen this poet avoiding the
reprobate letter, as much as another would a false quantity, and
making his escape from it through the several Greek dialects, when
he was pressed with it in any particular syllable. For the most apt
and elegant word in the whole language was rejected, like a diamond
with a flaw in it, if it appeared blemished with a wrong letter. I
shall only observe upon this head, that if the work I have here
mentioned had been now extant, the "Odyssey" of Tryphiodorus, in all
probability, would have been oftener quoted by our learned pedants
than the "Odyssey" of Homer. What a perpetual fund would it have
been of obsolete words and phrases, unusual barbarisms and
rusticities, absurd spellings and complicated dialects! I make no
question but that it would have been looked upon as one of the most
valuable treasuries of the Greek tongue.
I find likewise among the ancients that ingenious kind of conceit
which the moderns distinguish by the name of a rebus, that does not
sink a letter, but a whole word, by substituting a picture in its
place. When Caesar was one of the masters of the Roman mint, he
placed the figure of an elephant upon the reverse of the public
money; the word Caesar signifying an elephant in the Punic language.
Pages:
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80