I have found by trial Homer a more pleasing task than Virgil, (tho’ I say not the translation will be less laborious).  For the Grecian is more according to my genius than the Latin poet.  In the works of the two authors we may read their manners and natural inclinations, which are wholly different.  Virgil was of a quiet, sedate temper; Homer was violent, impetuous, and full of fire.  The chief talent of Virgil was propriety of thoughts, and ornament of words; Homer was rapid in his thoughts, and took all the liberties, both of numbers and of expressions, which his language, and the age in which he liv’d, allow’d him.  Homer’s invention was more copious, Virgil’s more confin’d; so that if Homer had not led the way, it was not in Virgil to have begun heroic poetry; for nothing can be more evident than that the Roman poem is but the second part of the Ilias; a continuation of the same story, and the persons already form’d; the manners of AEneas are those of Hector superadded to those which Homer gave him.  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.  He tells us that the first beauty of an epic poem consists in diction, that is, in the choice of words, and harmony of numbers; now the words are the coloring of the work, which in the order of nature is last to be consider’d.  The design, the disposition, the manners, and the thoughts, are all before it:  where any of those are wanting or imperfect, so much wants or is imperfect in the imitation of human life; which is in the very definition of a poem.  Words, indeed, like glaring colors, are the first beauties that arise and strike the sight:  but if the draught be false or lame, the figures ill disposed, the manners obscure or inconsistent, or the thoughts unnatural, then the finest colors are but daubing, and the piece is a beautiful monster