private records or memorials of every sort of valuable knowledge in every art and science.

Other methods of enigmatical disguise, subservient to the same purposes, might be these; the referring to a particular thing by the mention of another thing, very different in kind, but having a like name in sound, which is commonly called punning, or playing upon a word; the treating of one place or country under cover of another, from some casual resemblances between the two, either in respect of the shape of their outlines, or their being the one a colony to, or under the controul, or in long connection or alliance with the other; and, again, by ascribing the circumstances of friendship, affinity, and consanguinity, (or their opposites, as enmity and the like,) to different places or countries as they severally make up, or are severed from other places and countries. If the reader will carry these, as some of the many ancient methods of enigmatizing, in his recollection, I think it cannot fail to appear to him very satisfactorily, that, in like manner as

the compositions attempted to be explained in the preceding volumes, are to be understood in a sense very different from what he might have previously supposed, so the two famous poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, do, in fact, covertly treat of objects of far greater consequence than they primarily and ostensibly import; and this I am about to shew in the ensuing dissertation. If, indeed, the classics in general contained no other matters than what is now commonly understood from them, they would be little worth the seven or ten years of our lives which we pass in the acquisition of their languages; but if in acquiring their languages our youth were at the same time taught to imbibe the various sorts of information they contain, their value would be equal to that of the Sybil's Books, and their contents would be learned with pleasure as well as with profit. To apply this reasoning to the Poems of Homer, if the different ages of antiquity were really entitled to all those praises we bestow upon them on the score of wisdom and skill in all the arts and sciences, is it credible that

they would have themselves admired or recommended to the admiration of their posterity two poems, the main subject of one of which would appear to be nothing but a series of battles in a quarrel about an adulterous woman; and in the other of which, we find such stories as those of the Cyclops, of the Syrens, and of Circe and her swine but under a juster view of those poems, as framed upon some or all of the principles of disguise above mentioned, (and chiefly that of describing great things under the semblance of small,) we shall find in the Iliad all the different nations of Europe, (under much the same systems of policy as they are at present constituted,) engaged in a war for a great and legitimate object, in which war, through the medium of their colonies, all the rest of the world is involved, just as we see the course of events carried on in our days. Mr. Hume in one of his Essays* has fan

* The passage alluded to is in the seventeenth essay of his first volume, entitled the Rise of Arts and Sciences, as follows: "Affairs are now returned nearly to the same ·

cied a resemblance between the policy of the Grecian states, and that of the different nations of Europe. It is amusing to reflect how near he was to the truth in this notion, without hitting upon the reality: for the ancient writers did, in fact, under the disguise and cover of those little States, treat of the affairs and interests of the various countries of Europe at large; and as their subject necessarily brought into question the colonies belonging to those countries, it took its range by turns through every quarter of the globe.* In a word it is utterly incredible to any

situation as before, and Europe is at present a copy at large, of what Greece was formerly a pattern in miniature."

* If the propositions advanced in the four or five preceding pages are only so many errors, they are now errors of somewhat long standing; for one of the dissertations mentioned in the preface to the first volume (the one in question, is dated Jan. 19, 1805,) contained the following statements, and I have since had occasion to doubt the truth of those statements.

I have long since come to a clear conviction in my own

body who reflects but for a moment, that so small a country as Greece, surrounded by the Turks, the

mind, that the Greeks, the Romans, and the Egyptians, never were in truth such nations as we suppose them to have beca; of which, as to the Romans in particular, Virgil gives a hint in his first Eclogue, 20,

Urbem quam dicunt Romain, Melibae, putavi

Stultus ego huic nostræ similem

and indeed I take the languages themselves of Greece and Rome to be no other than (the desiderata of the moderns) artificial universal languages, formed out of the different European languages as their foundations: the first being so framed at Athens (which city was never probably any thing more than an university, centrally situated between Europe, Asia, and Egypt in Africa), and so having the proper (or modern) Greek tongue for its main basis; and the second, the Latin, invented at Rome by the Catholic, or universal priesthood established there, and so formed upon the Italian (or the Spanish rather, perhaps,) as its principal basis: it follows from hence, that instead of saying that an English, French, or Italian word is derived from a Greek or Latin one, we ought in truth to say that the latter are derived from the former. Instances of affinity between