ancients; and in this shall give the reader two or three other
species of them, that flourished in the same early ages of the
world. The first I shall produce are the lipogrammatists or letter-
droppers of antiquity, that would take an exception, without any
reason, against some particular letter in the alphabet, so as not to
admit it once into a whole poem. One Tryphiodorus was a great
master in this kind of writing. He composed an "Odyssey" or epic
poem on the adventures of Ulysses, consisting of four-and-twenty
books, having entirely banished the letter A from his first book,
which was called Alpha, as lucus a non lucendo, because there was
not an Alpha in it. His second book was inscribed Beta for the same
reason. In short, the poet excluded the whole four-and-twenty
letters in their turns, and showed them, one after another, that he
could do his business without them.

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.