n Homer: for he
was evidently the domestic poet, and the lyre he touched was formed of
the strings of the human heart. He was the painter of passions, and the
historian of the manners. The opinion of Quintilian is confirmed by the
golden fragments preserved for the English reader in the elegant
versions of Cumberland. Even of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who
each wrote about one hundred dramas, seven only have been preserved of
AEschylus and of Sophocles, and nineteen of Euripides. Of the one hundred
and thirty comedies of Plautus, we only inherit twenty imperfect ones.
The remainder of Ovid's Fasti has never been recovered.

I believe that a philosopher would consent to lose any poet to regain an
historian; nor is this unjust, for some future poet may arise to supply
the vacant place of a lost poet, but it is not so with the historian.
Fancy may be supplied; but Truth once lost in the annals of mankind
leaves a chasm never to be filled.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 27: Book III. Letter V. Melmoth's translation.]

[Footnote 28: Book I. Letter XVI.]

QUODLIBETS, OR SCHOLASTIC DISQUISITIONS.

The scholastic questions were called _Questiones Quodlibeticae_; and they
were generally so ridiculous that we have retained the word _Quodlibet_
in our vernacular style, to express anything ridiculously subtile;
something which comes at length to be distinguished into nothingness,

"With all the rash dexterity of wit."

The history of the scholastic philosophy furnishes an instructive theme;
it enters into the history of the human mind, and fills a niche in our
literary annals. The works of the scholastics, with the debates of these
_Quodlibetarians_, at once show the greatness and the littleness of the
human intellect; for though they often degenerate into incredible
absurdities, those who have examined the works of Thomas Aquinas and
Duns Scotus have confessed their admiration of the Herculean texture of
brain which they exhausted in demolishing their aerial fabrics.

The following is a slight sketch of the school divinity.

The christian doctrines in the primitive ages of the gospel were adapted
to the simple comprehension of the multitude; metaphysical subtilties
were not even employed by the Fathers, of whom several are eloquent. The
Homilies explained, by an obvious interpretation, some scriptural point,
or inferred, by artless illustration, some moral doctrine. When the
Arabians became the only lear