women, such as hobgoblins, ghosts, dreams, spilling salt, &c.) was my
classical enthusiasm, which I received from the books I read, and the
masters who explained them to me. I was convinced there had been no
common sense nor common honesty in the world for these last fifteen
hundred years; but that they were totally extinguished with the
ancient Greek and Roman governments. Homer and Virgil could have no
faults, because they were ancient; Milton and Tasso could have no
merit, because they were modern. And I could almost have said, with
regard to the ancients, what Cicero, very absurdly and unbecomingly
for a philosopher, says with regard to Plato, _Cum quo errare malim
quam cum aliis recte sentire_. Whereas now, without any extraordinary
effort of genius, I have discovered that nature was the same three
thousand years ago as it is at present; that men were but men then as
well as now; that modes and customs vary often, but that human nature
is always the same. And I can no more suppose, that men were better,
braver, or wiser, fifteen hundred or three thousand years ago, than I
can suppose that the animals or vegetables were better then than
they are now. I dare assert too, in defiance of the favourers of the
ancients, that Homer's hero Achilles was both a brute and a scoundrel,
and consequently an improper character for the hero of an epic poem;
he had so little regard for his country, that he would not act in
defence of it, because he had quarrelled with Agamemnon about a--; and
then afterwards, animated by private resentment only, he went about
killing people basely, I will call it, because he knew himself
invulnerable; and yet, invulnerable as he was, he wore the strongest
armour in the world; which I humbly apprehend to be a blunder; for a
horseshoe clapped to his vulnerable heel would have been sufficient.
On the other hand, with submission to the favourers of the moderns,
I assert with Mr. Dryden, that the Devil is in truth the hero of
Milton's poem: his plan, which he lays, pursues, and at last executes,