“His impious race their blasphemy renew’d,
    And nature’s King, through nature’s optics view’d.”—­Dryden cor.

UNDER RULE IV.—­OF PROPER NAMES.

“Islamism prescribes fasting during the month Ramadan.”—­Balbi cor. “Near Mecca, in Arabia, is Jebel Nor, or the Mountain of Light, on the top of which the Mussulmans erected a mosque, that they might perform their devotions where, according to their belief, Mohammed received from the angel Gabriel the first chapter of the Koran.”—­G.  Brown.  “In the Kaaba at Mecca there is a celebrated block of volcanic basalt, which the Mohammedans venerate as the gift of Gabriel to Abraham, but their ancestors once held it to be an image of Remphan, or Saturn; so ’the image which fell down from Jupiter,’ to share with Diana the homage of the Ephesians, was probably nothing more than a meteoric stone.”—­Id. “When the Lycaonians at Lystra took Paul and Barnabas to be gods, they called the former Mercury, on account of his eloquence, and the latter Jupiter, for the greater dignity of his appearance.”—­Id. “Of the writings of the apostolic fathers of the first century, but few have come down to us; yet we have in those of Barnabas, Clement of Rome, Hermas, Ignatius, and Polycarp, very certain evidence of the authenticity of the New Testament, and the New Testament is a voucher for the Old.”—­Id. “It is said by Tatian, that Theagenes of Rhegium, in the time of Cambyses, Stesimbrotus the Thracian, Antimachus the Colophonian, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, Dionysius the Olynthian, Ephorus of Cumae, Philochorus the Athenian, Metaclides and Chamaeleon the Peripatetics, and Zenodotus, Aristophanes, Callimachus, Crates, Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, and Apollodorus, the grammarians, all wrote concerning the poetry, the birth, and the age of Homer.”—­See Coleridge’s Introd., p. 57.  “Yet, for aught that now appears, the life of Homer is as fabulous as that of Hercules; and some have even suspected, that, as the son of Jupiter and Alcmena has fathered the deeds of forty other Herculeses, so this unfathered son of Critheis, Themisto, or whatever dame—­this Melesigenes, Maeonides, Homer—­the blind schoolmaster, and poet, of Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodes, Argos, Athens, or whatever place—­has, by the help of Lycurgus, Solon, Pisistratus, and other learned ancients, been made up of many poets or Homers, and set so far aloft and aloof on old Parnassus, as to become a god in the eyes of all Greece, a wonder in those of all Christendom.”—­G.  Brown.