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gracious interest he had taken in my life. The generous Mosczinsky embraced me, and begged I would do him the favour of accepting the trifling present of a travelling carriage, as I was not provided with one of my own, at the same time conjuring me to write to him. Before I left Warsaw, I heard that Binetti's husband had eloped with her maid, carrying with them all her diamonds and plate, but that the fair-one's friends had agreed to lose no time in repairing her losses. The next day, I paid all my debts, and made my arrangements for leaving Warsaw the following morning, in company with Count Clari. -He travelled in his own carriage, and I in the one Mosczinsky had given me. We directed our course towards Breslau.

FROM THE MONTHLY REVIEW.

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An Examination of the Primary Argument of the Iliad. By Gran

ville Penn, Esq. 8vo. pp. 366. 128. Boards. Ogle and Ďuncan, 1821. SOME years

have elapsed since we examined a critical work by Mr. Penn, of the same general class and character as the present;* and we can with truth assert that, in the interval, nothing of this kind has fallen under our examination, which can in any degree challenge a comparison with the labours of this author. Both the publications in question display merit of a very peculiar sort ;-a comprehensive as well as a minute view of the subject;-scholarship very distinguished; -fulness and accuracy of detail ;—and, above all, a poetical mind: which, added to the above qualities, and supported throughout by severe judgment, nearly completes the requisites for excellence in the highest department of liberal and classical investigation.

This unusual strain of praise we consider as amply warranted by the performance before us; and if the learned reader's curiosity be excited in any measure equal to our own when we first opened this volume, he will be obliged to us for being brief in our introductory matter, and for communicating as much of Mr. Penn's very original observations as our limits will allow.

It certainly is a very curious fact in the annals of poetical criticism, that the first of all poems, in every sense, has given rise to such a variety of conjectures as to its principal and pervading subject; or, as Mr. Penn designates the point in dispute, its “Primary Argument." That Aristotle

praised this argument, and attributed to it the specific merit of a beginning, a middle, and an end, -without either defining what the whole was or marking the division of its parts,-is a puzzling circumstance; unless we have recourse to one of the following hypotheses, to solve the difficulty. The work of Aristotle, then, or that passage of the work, is lost, in which he proved the justice of his own panegyric on the Iliad ; or we must adopt the highly probable notion of Mr. Penn, that Aristotle, speaking of what was matter of common notoriety, drew his inferences without laying down his premises, and reasoned on the subject of the Iliad without any statement of

* We mean the “Observations upon the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil, published anonymously." See M. R. vol. Ixix. p. 412.

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that subject itself. In this case, we may say of the critic as Horace says of the poet,

“in medias res Non secus ac notas auditorem rapit.” “The judgment of Horace,” (as Mr. P. observes) " which is entirely conformable to that of Aristotle, and which was delivered three hundred after him, ought, in all reason, to have checked such overweening confidence" as that of the modern critics who adopt neither of the above theories, but, “like Lucien's Alexander in the Shades," seem to exclaim, contemptuously, concerning AristotleHe wise! who is the most impudent of all cozeners !"_“ Allow us alone to know any thing about Aristotle.” It is hardly necessary to add that it is to the German school especially, and to Wolfe at their head, that Mr. Penn here alludes; and really we must think that the altior critice (as they modestly call it) of those daring scholars does deserve some such reprehension. With regard to the French critics, they had previously taken an entirely different course: but, as Mr. Penn equally proves, a course as distant as that of the Germans from Aristotle and Homer. While the followers of Madame Dacier extol the unities in the Iliad, and by assuming a wrong subject for the poem contradict their own praises, Wolfe and his disciples, with much more sagacity, but with a boldness far from enviable, deny the existence of any such unity; taking it for granted that they also have discovered the right argument, but being in truth as egregiously deceived as their French predecessors.

The reason given by Wolfe for "holding in undisguised contempt those who do not perceive the Iliad to be faulty by a great excess," if it be tried by Aristotle's text, is the following: "That it exceeds the measure of Achilles's anger towards Agamemnon.”—“ The first seven

" lines," he asserts, “ promise nothing beyond the eighteenth book. The remainder do not contain the anger of Achilles towards Agamemnon and the Greeks, but a very different anger," &c. &c. The aspiring critic then proceeds to suggest a new proëm for the Iliad, relating to the glory of Achilles :

ΚΥΛΟΣ αειδε Θεα.κ. τ. λ. of which, on a proper occasion, we could say something farther; and he concludes in Mr. Penn's extract) by this profound remark: “ But, whoever he was that subjoined those latter books, he was without doubt a very ancient poet!"

Heyne entirely agrees with Wolfe on the general question, but differs from him considerably on some particular points. Among others, it is with the death of Hector that he would conclude the proper subject of the Iliad; for this extraordinary reason, “that the death of Hector appeased the anger of Achilles." What anger? Not the anger against the Greeks;

and therefore not the anger mentioned by Homer in his Proëm. The critic complacently winds up his argument by observing ;—"so that the two last books are the work of another author;"-or, at all events, this is Heyne's conclusion, " that the mind of him who composed the poem, or of him who enlarged its bulk, was not imbued with so subtile a notion of the Epopea as some persons would maintain.” Poor Aristotle, and mistaken Horace!

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The acquiescent and unreasoning admiration of the French school forms a striking contrast to the inventive but unsound logic of the German. While Wolfe is cutting away six and Heyne two books from Homer, Madame Dacier is placidly propounding her little periods of Aristotelian criticism. “The poem has all its proper parts. It has, as Aristotle teaches us in his Poetics, a beginning, a middle, and an end.” Surely it is impossible to forget our inimitable contemporary in his exhibition of a French Lecture on English Literature, when we are summoned to the above declaration ex cathedrá, by Madame Dacier, and then read the reasons that support it. “The beginning," she says, “is Achilles ; who, incensed against Agamemnon, passes from a state of tranquillity to a state of anger; the middle is the effects of that anger, and all the evils which it produces; and the end is the return of Achilles into a state of tranquillity, by the death of Hector, who had slain Patroclus.” Two brief questions of Mr. Penn set this solemn nothing in its proper light :- - How can the beginning of one thing find its end in the end of another? How can the end of Achilles's anger towards Hector constitute the end of his anger towards Agamemnon ?”

We are sorry to be obliged to subjoin to this insufficient sketch of German excentricities, and French misapprehensions, on the subject of the Iliad, some account of the aberrations of our own countrymen in the same track. If we refer to Pope, we shall find nothing but the anger of Achilles ; with vain and unfortunate attempts to defend Homer from the mistaken imputation of violating the rules of art, by alleging, with a common-place feeling and a shallow character of criticism more worthy of the present day than of himself, that “ Homer's Poem is a wild Paradise," &c. &c.; and other empty topics of declamation, wholly unfit to defend (as Mr. Penn expresses it) “ the

regulated excellences of the Iliad." Lord Kaimes, Dr. Blair, and the late Poet Laureat, are successively shown to have failed in the same attempt to reconcile the (supposed) conduct of the Iliad with the encomium of the Stagyrite; or to defend the poet at the expense of the critic. The remarks, with which Mr. Penn enforces this portion of his subject, are so good an introduction to his own view of the “ Pri. mary Argument” of the Iliad; and at the same time furnish so much matter for reflection to each of those three great classes of modern literary men, the poet, the critic by profession, and the wholesale admirer; that we feel bound to extract them.

“It is surprising, that men of tutored minds should be so ready to regard rule, as something opposed to nature ; for, where do we see rule so admirably marked and observed, as in the operations of what we denominate nature? We see this to be the case in the material world, and we are conscious of it in the intellectual. The fact is, that we are too apt to consider nothing as nature in poetry, but the unregulated sallies of the imagination. Whereas, to render every mental operation perfect in its kind, the presiding power of reason must exercise a perpetual government over the motions of the mind, and regulate them by principles of truth and propriety, which, in effect, are rules. This it did in Homer; and those principles, detected and declared, constitute the rules of Aristotle. These rules, and Homer's practice, will never be found to be at variance, if they are duly investigated; and, therefore, the contradiction which Pye thought he discovered be. tween the place where Homer has ended the Iliad, and the place where Aristotle's rules would require that it should have ended, is only a proof of his own failure of apprehending the primary argument that Aristotle contemplated in the poem; not any, of a discordancy between the genuine argument of the poem, and Aristotle's critical rules."

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Let us now announce Mr. Penn's original vindication of Homer and Aristotle, from the confusion and the audacity of a whole host of modern critics and interpreters. Nothing can be more modest, or more ingenuous, than the manner in which he introduces his own acute and convincing train of reasoning; and we owe it to him to state that, although his observations on the above-mentioned critics of every nation have formed the basis of our own remarks, yet the decided reproof, which we have deemed it incumbent on us to bestow on such presumptuous or shallow theories, is to be attributed to ourselves.

We conceive that the fairest and best way of opening this argument, now that it is cleared from the rubbish of preceding commentators by the satisfactory labours of the present author,* is to quote the first seven lines of the Iliad, according to the punctuation of Mr. Penn:

• ΜΗΝΙΝ αείδε, θεα, ΠΗΛΗΪΑΔΕΩ ΑΧΙΛΗΟΣ

αυλομένην, η μυρι' Αχαιοίς άλγεα θηκες
πολλους δ' ιφθίμους ψυχας αϊδι προϊάψει
ηρωων. αυτους δε έλωρια τευχε κύνεσσιν

οιωνοίσι τε πασι• ΔΙΟΣ ΔΕ ΤΕΛΕΙΕΤΟ ΒΟΥΛΗ,
ΕΞ ΟΥ ΔΗ τα πρωτα διαστήτην ερίσαντε
Ατρείδης τε αναξ ανδρών και Διος Αχιλλευς.”

To this quotation we must subjoin Mr. P.'s remarks:

"This punctuation will demand a corresponding alteration in the translation of Pope, which may, perhaps, be thus supplied:

"ACHILLES' WRATH, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing!
That wrath, which hurl'd to Pluto's gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain,
Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore:
YET, wrought TH' ALMIGHTY FATHER to fulfil
The sure decrees of HIS RESISTLESS WILL,

Ev'N FROM THE DAY when, rous'd to strife, as foes
Atrides and Achilles first arose!

"I know not what sort of dignity Blair supposed that a modern would require in the opening of a great epic poem, that can rise above the elevation of this. The proem thus directs us to expect, generally, the perpetual accomplishment of the divine will throughout the poem, whatever opposition it might find in the angered will of Achilles; while the narrative lays open to us all the particulars, in which that divine will was so accomplished."

After four preliminary chapters, in which Mr. Penn has fully discussed the matters so briefly introduced in this article, and after a thorough examination of the constituent parts of the poem, which we are unable to insert and will not injure by mutilation, he thus advances to his main subject:

"In taking thus a comprehensive view of the entire Iliad, we plainly perceive, that the poem distributes itself into two principal parts or divisions; of which, the

We can only refer to the work for the means of justly appreciating one of the closest and most candid pieces of reasoning.

VOL. I. No. 4.-Museum.

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former division is distinguished by the inaction of Achilles, and the effects of that inaction; and the latter, by the action of Achilles, and the effects of that action; and that they unite in an intermediate point of articulation, in which the former division finds its termination, and the latter division its commencement.

“We find, that in each of those parts the determination of the will of Achilles is strongly declared, yet in both parts he acts in direct opposition to the determination of his own will; while, at the same time, he acts in exact conformity to the contrary declared will of Jupiter.

We find, that in both cases, that conformity is produced through the interven. tion of the supreme power of Jupiter, and by the means employed by him for that end; that his power is directed in the first division of the poem, to restore the inaction of Achilles to action; and, in the second division, to cause that action to accomplish the particular purpose for which it was restored; so that the end ultimately attained by the action, was the same for which the inaction was originally to be overcome.

“ We find, therefore, that the will of Jupiter prescribes the rule of the action of Achilles, and is the efficient agency of the main action of the poem; and that the will of Achilles is totally subordinate to that supreme will

, and is rendered its chief instrumental agent in accomplishing that main action. For, Achilles is made to act -and to act by the rule of that willwhen he had most resolutely determined not to act; and to do, in substance and circumstance-by the same rule—what he had with equal resolution determined not to do.

“It is not difficult, therefore, now to perceive that THE PRIMARY AND GOVERNING ARGUMENT OF THE ILIAD, coextensive with its extent, running through all its length and reaching to its extreme termination, is—the sure and irresistible power of the divine will, over the most resolute and determined will of manexemplified in the death uud burial of Hector, by the instrumentality of Achillesas the immediate preliminary to the destruction of Troy.

“ It is this eminent office of Achilles in the Iliad, that supplies the true cause of the phenomenon which Clarke has repeatedly pointed out for observation, but to which he has assigned no cause : "It ought to be remarked,' says he, with what great artifice (in order that the poem may be one, from its beginning to its end,) Achilles is seen, or mentioned, in every event that is related, and in every speech that is spoken.'* He makes the same remark, and almost in the same words, four several times.

“ This great governing argument is so plain and obvious, and lies so superficially exposed upon the poem, that nothing can have prevented the attention of learned critics from recognising it, but the vast accumulations of multifarious learning with which their views have been crowded and encumbered. It required, especially in these times of minute criticism, a mind levis armaturæ; unfurnished with so massive and various a panoply of critical warfare, and therefore better equipped for a speedy movement; to take a rapid and general survey of the whole subject. Such must have been the manner, in which the poem unfolded its great argument to its first auditors; who listened to its narrative with a continuous attention rivetted upon the tale, and uninterrupted by any distractions of curious research; much less, of that meteoric subtilty, which Wolfe entitles the altior critice. But our learned critics could never descend to use Homer so popularly and so unlearnedly. Their attention to the story was therefore arrested, or called aside, at every step they took, by the innumerable interests which they met with on the way; which so impeded and retarded their progress, that they lost every oppor. tunity of grasping an entire view of the whole. In this they unfortunately copied the example of the Alexandrian critics; and this is the true cause of the fact remarked by Heyne, that after the days of Aristotle, many, and especially the more modern, no longer trod in his footsteps.'t The delay, thus occasioned, caused them to dwell so long upon subordinate arguments; "which,' as Aristotle

«* Notandum, quanto cum artificio (ut poëma unum sit a capite ad calcem,) quicquid rerum narretur, quisquis hominum loquatur, nusquam non spectetur et inseratur Achilles. Not. ad II, xüï. 324. conf. nott, ad, ul. 673. v. 788. vii. 228.”

Ҡ Post Aristotelem, multos, et multo magis recentiores, in ejus vestigiis non substitisse. Hom. T. vii. p. 800."

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