Aristotle. The heirs of Theophrastus buried them in the ground, at Scepsis, a town of Troas, to hide them from King Pergamus. Here they lay concealed a hundred and sixty years, and were, at the end of that time, sold to one Appellicon, a rich citizen of Athens. They fell afterwards into the hands of Sylla; after that they were possessed by Tyrannian, a grammarian; and next they became the property of Andronicus, of Rhodes, who first made them public about two hundred and fifty years after the death of Aristotle.

Thus, we have a Virgil who imitated a Homer, who never was a writer!—and we have a Horace who stole from the works of an Aristotle, which works it is insinuated are spurious! But neither is Zoilus himself, of Philadelphus, nor Le Mercier, the Zoilus of France, to be put in the smallest competition with Father Ardouine, who, determined to put the matter out of doubt, roundly asserts, upon his own single authority, that Homer, Virgil, and Horace were all forged by monks, in the twelfth century!! Perhaps it was upon some occasion like this that Pascal said it was easier to find monks than reasons.
Thus go on these Aristarchuses in criticism. The defenders of Virgil, assuming great candour, tell us that they subscribe to those charges brought against him, above mentioned, but that he certainly excelled Hesiod. Justice however obliges them to confess that he fell short of Theocritus in the same proportion as the Latin is inferior to the Greek. They confess too that he stole from Lucretius; but this, they add, was a proof of his esteem

for him. They then candidly hint that it was little better than receiving stolen goods, for that Lucretius himself is suspected of having taken some of his works from Empedocles and others, and yet, in the same breath, they say that Lucretius ranks before all other Latin authors. They defend Virgil from a charge that Lucan was a greater poet, combating the opinions of Heinsius, Corneille, Heron, and Fielding, who all give the palm to Lucan; but, to make this defence as left-handed as possible, they allow that the Pharsalia is more complete than the Aeneid, because there is a fault in the chronology; which anacronism, however, to gloss over, they insist that Virgil intended it as a beauty, and then follow up this cold compliment by saying that Lucan, though an original, was an original of no value. The deduction therefore is, that it is doubtful whether Virgil was not a worse poet than