nature, and circumstances of truth, that the mind discovers and feels the resemblance between fiction and reality; and thence gives credit to the former, when it embellishes and exaggerates. Truth is naturally circumstanţial, especially in matters that interest the feelings; for that, which has been strongly impressed upon the mind, naturally leaves precise and determinate ideas: whence a narration is always rendered more credible by being minutely detailed; provided the minute particulars are such as really do happen in similar transactions, with which we are acquainted. That which is demonstrably false can never, by any means, acquire even the semblance of truth; but that, which we judge to be false only by analogy and general experience, may acquire such semblance, by being connected with circumstances, which, demonstration or experience tell us, are true; or by arising out of events, which analogy tells us, may be true; and the more of these real circumstances, and probable events are connected with it, the more credible will it seem.

30. Hence we may account for the extreme exactitude, with which, that supreme master of fiction, the author of the Iliad, has described every thing, in which error or inaccuracy might be detected, either by experience, or demonstration. The structure of the human body; the effects of wounds; the symptoms of death;

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the actions and manners of wild beasts; the relative situations of cities and countries; and Of Judge, the influence of winds and tempests upon the

ment.

waters of the sea, are all described with a precision, which, not only no other poet, but scarcely any technical writer upon the respective subjects of anatomy, hunting, geography and navigation has ever attained. The hyperboles are all in the actions of his gods and heroes; in which, exaggeration could not be detected: but in every object and every circumstance, which it was possible for his audience practically to know, the most scrupulous exactness, in every minute particular, is religiously observed. There are near twenty descriptions of the various effects of wind upon water-all different, and all without one fictitious or exaggerated circumstance-no fluctus ad sidera tollit; or imo consurgit ad æthera fundo, which even Virgil, the most modest of his imitators, has not avoided, but the common occurrences of nature, raised into sublimity by being selected with taste, and expressed with energy.

31. The untutored, but uncorrupted feelings of all unpolished nations have regulated their fictions upon the same principles, even when most rudely exhibited. In relating the actions of their gods and deceased heroes, they are licentiously extravagant: for there falsehood

could amuse, because it could not be detected: but in describing the common appearances of nature; and all those objects and effects, which are exposed to habitual observation, their bards. are scrupulously exact; so that an extravagant hyperbole, in a matter of this kind, is sufficient to mark as counterfeit any composition attributed to them. In the early stages of society, men are as acute and accurate in practical observation, as they are limited and deficient in speculative science; and in proportion as they are ready to give up their imaginations to delusion, they are jealously tenacious of the evidence of their senses. James Macpherson, in the person of his blind bard, could say with applause, in the eighteenth century, "Thus "have I seen in Cona; but Cona I behold no "more-thus have I seen two dark hills re"moved from their place by the strength of the "mountain stream. They turn from side to "side, and their tall oaks meet one another "on high. Then they fall together with all "their rocks and trees." But had a blind bard, or any other bard, presumed to utter such a rhapsody of bombast in the hall of shells, amid the savage warriors, to whom Ossian is supposed to have sung, he would have needed all the influence of royal birth, attributed to that fabulous personage, to restrain the audience from throwing their shells at his head, and

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hooting him out of their company as an impudent liar. They must have been sufficiently acquainted with the rivulets of Cona or GlenCoe to know that he had seen nothing of the kind, and have known enough of mountain torrents in general to know that no such effects are ever produced by them; and would, therefore, have indignantly rejected such a barefaced attempt to impose on their credulity. In all the numerous descriptions of the kind, which abound as illustrations in the Iliad, the fire of the poet never leads him to transgress the most rigid bounds of truth; nor is a single circumstance ever introduced, which the most scrupulous naturalist would not allow to be probable and consistent: for, in these objects of common observation, his audience were the most scrupulous of all naturalists; who were only to be satisfied, in poetry, with the same fidelity of imitation, as the Turkish emperor required in painting upon exactly the same principle.

32. In the Odyssey there is generally less detail, as well as less variety and brilliancy of imagery; but the attention to truth, in all circumstances of common observation, is so far the same, that we might securely pronounce the passage, in which the notes of the nightingale are treated as notes of sorrow * to be the pro

5. 518-23.

duction of a later age, even if the judgment of
the ancient grammarians, and the less question-
able authority of modernisms in the language,
had not marked the whole episode, in which it
is introduced, to be spurious*: for the habits
of life both of the poet and his audience, in that
early stage of society, must have forced them
to observe that the notes of singing birds are
notes of amorous joy and exultation; and that
they are all mute in grief or calamity. Accord-
ingly we find that, when he does take an image
of distress from the lamentations of birds for
the loss of their young, he takes it from birds
of
prey, which do scream and make loud moan
when their nests are plundered †. Virgil never-
theless, in his blended imitation of both pas-
sages, has, in defiance of truth and nature,
retained the more delicate and interesting.
image, and attributed the thrilling note of sor-
row, expressed in the scream of the eagle or
the vulture, to the song of the nightingale ‡;
and there can be no doubt that the courtly cri-
tics, for whom he wrote, thought this a most
judicious and elegant amendment; nor do the
courtly or even scholastic critics of the present
day probably entertain very different senti-
ments but nevertheless had the old Greek
bard obtruded such a palpable misrepresenta-

T. 343-587. † π. 217. ↑ Georgic. iv.

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