 therefore nothing left for it but a comparative view of that abuse which has been levelled at others and myself, and, upon that enumeration, I shall be driven to estimate my own labours at that humble rate which the public will always give its due praise, but which aspires at nothing more.
To begin with the ancients. Has any writer sustained more rank and foul abuse than Homer? who, after all, is so justly styled the father of poetry: and if they began with the father, no wonder they have so completely gone through all the family.—It has been said that the muses themselves set him up a rival in Hesiod, whom they invited to reside with them on Mount Helicon, and, that they might initiate him into all their mysteries, actually took him into their service, and endowed him with their own celestial genius. Tutored thus by his heavenly instructresses, he is said to have won a tripod from Homer at a poetical controversy at Chalcis; but

Alexander laughs at this business, construing it into a compliment to Homer, and saying that Hesiod might well win a prize from Homer, when not kings, but peasants were the judges.
When you come to Virgil, these candid reporters allow nothing more than that he was the translator and imitator of Homer; to prove which, they instance his sending Aeneas to hell, in positive imitation of the Odyssey, the conversation of the gods, the games, the ships, and many other things. But what sort of an imitator of Homer must he have been if it be true, as Le Mercier informs us, that Homer wrote neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey!—but that they were compiled from the works of all the eminent writers of that time; impressing very strongly an idea that Homer was merely a ballad singer, and that he invented nothing, but only promulgated the Grub-street doctrine of Greece.
It is said also that Virgil imitated Hesiod in his georgics, and Theocritus in his pastorals. Terrence too is said to have been no more than the

translator of Plautus, Livy the imitator of Herodotus, and Sallust of Thucidides, who had before been imitated in his writings—which, after all, were obscure—by Zenephon, and in his orations by Demosthenes. Horace, they report, stole his art of poetry from Aristotle's rhetoric; and, as to Aristotle himself, some have gone so far as to question whether we have any thing genuine of his at all, and they offer the following circumstance as a notable proof of this vague and strange opinion.
Theophrastus received, as a legacy, the writings of
