Page:The Poetical Works of Thomas Parnell (1833).djvu/263

Rh All I remember further was, that having asked him, what he designed with all those editions and comments I observed in his room? he made answer, that if any one, who had a mind to find fault with his performance, would but stay until it was entirely finished, he should have a very cheap bargain of them.

Since this discourse, I have often resolved to try what it was to translate in the spirit of a writer, and at last chose the Battle of the Frogs and Mice, which is ascribed to Homer; and bears a nearer resemblance to his Iliad, than the Culex does to the Æneid of Virgil. Statius and others think it a work of youth, written as a prelude to his greater poems. Chapman thinks it the work of his age, after he found men ungrateful; to show he could give strength, lineage, and fame, as he pleased, and praise a mouse as well as a man. Thus, says he, the poet professedly flung up the world, and applied himself at last to hymns. Now, though this reason of his may be nothing more than a scheme formed out of the order in which Homer's works are printed, yet does the conjecture, that this poem was written after the Iliad, appear probable, because of its frequent allusions to that poem; and particularly that there is not a frog or a mouse killed, which has not its parallel instance there, in the death of some warrior or other.

The poem itself is of the epic kind; the time of its action the duration of two days; the subject