The adventures of Ulysses in the _Odysseis_ are imitated in the first six books of Virgil's _Aeneis_; and tho' the accidents are not the same, (which would have argued him of a servile, copying, and total barrenness of invention,) yet the seas were the same, in which both the heroes wander'd; and Dido cannot be denied to be the poetical daughter of Calypso.

The six latter books of Virgil's poem are the four and twenty _Iliads_ contracted: a quarrel occasioned by a lady, a single combat, battles fought, and a town besieg'd.

I say not this in derogation to Virgil, neither do I contradict anything which I have formerly said in his just praise: for his episodes are almost wholly of his own invention; and the form which he has given to the telling makes the tale his own, even tho' the original story had been the same.

But this proves, however, that Homer taught Virgil to design; and if invention be the first virtue of an epic poet, then the Latin poem can only be allow'd the second place.

Mr.Hobbes, in the preface to his own bald translation of the _Ilias_ (studying poetry as he did mathematics, when it was too late)--Mr.Hobbes, I say, begins the praise of Homer where he should have ended it.