society. But the real design in the Iliad was directly the reverse.
Its obvious tendency was to inflame the minds of young readers with an
enthusiastic ardor for military fame; to inculcate the pernicious doctrine
of the divine right of kings; to teach both prince and people that military
plunder was the most honorable mode of acquiring property; and that
conquest, violence and war were the best employment of nations, the most
glorious prerogative of bodily strength and of cultivated mind.

How much of the fatal policy of states, and of the miseries and
degradations of social man, have been occasioned by the false notions of
honor inspired by the works of Homer, it is not easy to ascertain. The
probability is, that however astonishing they are as monuments of human
intellect, and how long soever they have been the subject of universal
praise, they have unhappily done more harm than good. My veneration for his
genius is equal to that of his most idolatrous readers; but my reflections
on the history of human errors have forced upon me the opinion that his
existence has really proved one of the signal misfortunes of mankind.

The moral tendency of the Eneid of Virgil is nearly as pernicious as that
of the works of Homer. Its poetical or fictitious design, the settlement
of his hero in Italy, is well delineated and steadily pursued. This object
must have been far more interesting to the Romans than the anger of
Achilles could have been to the Greeks. Had Virgil written his poem one or
two centuries earlier than he did, while his countrymen felt that they had
a country and were not themselves the property of a master, they must have
glowed with enthusiasm in reciting the fabulous labors of their ancestors,
and adored the songster who could have thus elevated so endearing a
subject; who could have adorned it with such an interesting variety of
incidents, such weight of pathos, such majesty of sentiment and harmony of
verse. But Virgil wrote and felt like a subject, not like a citizen. The