very place it is, that this author has more severely handled our belief, and more at large, than in any other part of all his writings, excepting only the Dialogue of Triephon and Critias,* wherein he lashes his own false gods with more severity than the true; and where the first Christians, with their cropped hair, their whining voices, melancholy faces, mournful discourses, and nasty habits, are described with a greater air of Calvinists or Quakers, than of Roman Catholics or Church-of-England men.

After all, what if this discourse last mentioned, and the rest of the dialogues wherein the Christians are satirized, were none of Lucian's? The learned and ingenious Dr. Mayne, whom I have before cited, is of this opinion, and confirms it by the attestation of Philander, Obsobæus, Mycillus, and Cognatus, whom since I have not read, or two of them but very superficially, I refer you for the faith of his quotation to the authors themselves.†

The next supposition concerning Lucian's religion is, that he was of none at all. I doubt not but the same people, who broached the story of his being once a Christian, followed their blow upon him in this second accusation.

There are several sorts of Christians at this day reigning in the world, who will not allow any man to believe in the Son of God, whose other articles of faith are not in all things conformable to theirs. Some of these exercise this rigid and severe kind of charity, with a good intent of reducing several sects into one common church; but the spirit of others is evidently seen by their detraction, their malice, their spitting venom, their raising false reports of those who are not of their communion. I wish the ancientness of these censorious principles may be proved by better arguments, than by any near resemblance they have with the primitive believers. But till I am convinced that Lucian has been charged with atheism of old, I shall be apt to think that this accusation is very modern. One of Lucian's translators pleads in his defence, that it was very improbable a man, who has laughed paganism out of doors, should believe no God; that he, who could point to the sepulchre of Jupiter in Crete, as well as our Tertullian, should be an atheist. But this argument, I confess, is of little weight to prove him a deist, only because he was no polytheist. He might as well believe in none as in many

• Entitled "Philopatris." The Christian religion, and its mysteries, are ridiculed in this piece with very little ceremony.

Gesner has written a long Latin essay upon this point, which is subjoined to the third volume of Lucian's works, in the quarto edition of Hemsterhucius.

gods: and on the other side, he might believe in many, as Julian did, and not in one. For my own part, I think it is not proved that either of them were apostates, though one of them, in hopes of an empire, might temporize, while Christianity was the mode at court. Neither is our author cleared any thing the more, because his writings have served, in the times of the heathens, to destroy that vain, unreasonable, and impious religion; that was an oblique service, which Lucian never intended us; for his business, like that of some modern polemics, was rather to pull down every thing, than to set up any thing. With what show of probability can I urge in his defence, that one of the greatest among the fathers bas drawn whole homilies from our author's dialogues, since I know that Lucian made them not for that purpose? The occasional good which he has done, is not to be imputed to him. St. Chrysostom, St. Augustin, and many others, have applied his arguments on better motives than their author proposed to himself in framing them.

These reasons, therefore, as they make nothing against his being an atheist, so they prove nothing of his believing one God; but only leave him as they found him, and leave us in as great an obscurity concerning his religion as before. I may be as much mistaken in my opinion as these great men have been before me; and this is very probable, because I know less of him than they; yet I have read him over more than once, and therefore will presume to say, that I think him either one of the Electic school,* or else a Skeptic: I mean, that he either formed a body of philosophy for his own use, out of the opinions and dogmas of several heathen philosophers disagreeing amongst themselves, or that he doubted of every thing; weighed all opinions, and adhered to none of them; only used them as they served his occasion for the present dialogue, and perhaps rejected them in the next. And indeed this last opinion is the more probable of the two, if we consider the genius of the man, whose image we may clearly see in the glass which he holds before us of his writings, which reflects him to our sight.

Not to dwell on examples, with which his works are amply furnished, I will only mention two.

In one, Socrates convinces his friend Charephon of the power of the gods in transformations, and of a supreme Providence which the world. In another, he confutes Jupiter, and accompanies that power in the administration of pulls him down from heaven to earth, by his own Homerical chain; and makes him only a subser.

⚫I follow Mr. Malone in reading electic for elective

vient slave to blind eternal Fate. I might add, that he is, in one half of his book, a Stoic, in the other an Epicurean; never constant to himself in any scheme of divinity, unless it be in despising his gentile gods. And this derision, as it shows the man himself, so it gives us an idea of the age in which he lived; for if that had been devout or ignorant, his scoffing humour would either have been restrained, or had not passed unpunished; all knowing ages being naturally skeptic, and not at all bigoted; which, if I am not much deceived, is the proper character of our own.

To conclude this article: He was too fantastical, too giddy, too irresolute, either to be any thing at all, or any thing long; and in this view I cannot think he was either a steady atheist, or a deist, but a doubter, a skeptic, as he plainly declares himself to be, when he puts himself under the name of Hermotimus, the Stoic, in the dialogue called the "Dialogue of the Sects."

As for his morals, they are spoken of as variously as his opinions. Some are for decrying him more than he deserves; his defenders themselves dare not set him up for a pattern of severe virtue. No man is so profligate, as openly to profess vice; and therefore it is no wonder, if under the reign of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines, of which the last was his patron and benefactor, he lived not so much a libertine as he had it to be in his nature. He is more accused for his love of boys than of women. Not that we have any particular story to convince us of this detestable passion in him; but his own writings bear this record against him, that he speaks often of it, and I know not that ever he condemns it. Repeated expressions, as well as repeated actions, witness some secret pleasure in the deed, or at least some secret inclination to it. He seems to insinuate, in his "Dialogue of Loves," that Socrates was given to this vice; but we find not that he blames him for it, which, if he had been wholly innocent himself, it became a philosopher to have done. But as we pass over a foul way as has tily as we can, so I will leave this abominable subject, which strikes me with horror when I name it.

If there be any who are guilty of this sin, we may assure ourselves they will never stop at any other; for when they have overleaped the bounds of nature, they run so fast to all other immoralities, that the grace of God, without a miracle, can never overtake them.

Lucian is accused likewise for his writing 20 lusciously in his "Dialogues of the Har

lots."* It has been the common fault of al: satirists, to make vice too amiable, while they expose it; but of all men living, I am the most unfit to accuse Lucian, who am so little able to defend myself from the same objection. We find not, however, that Lucian was charged with the wantonness of his "Dialogues" in his own life-time. If he had been, he would certainly have answered for himself; as he did to those who accused him for exposing Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, and other great philosophers, to the laughter of the people, when Jupiter sold them by any inch of candle. But, to confess the truth, [as] I am of their opinion, who think that answer of his not over-ingenuous, viz. that he only attacked the false philosophers of their sects, in their persons whom he honoured; so I am persuaded, that he could not have alleged more in his excuse for these "Dialogues," than that, as he taught harlots to deceive, so, at the same time, he discovered their deceits to the knowledge of young men, and thereby warned

them to avoid the snare.

I find him not charged with any other faults, than what I have already mentioned. He was otherwise of a life as unblameable as any man, for aught we find to the contrary; and I have this probable inducement to believe it, because he had so honourable an employment under Marcus Aurelius, an emperor as clear-sighted as he was truly virtuous; for both which qualities we need not quote Lucian, who was so much obliged to him, but may securely appeal to Herodian, and to all the historians who have written of him, besides the testimony of his own admirable works, which are yet in the hands o. all the learned.

As for those who condemn our author for the too much gall and virulency of his satires, it is to be suspected, says Dr. Mayne, that they themselves are guilty of those hypocrisies, crimes, and follies, which he so sharply exposes, and at the same time endeavours to reform. I may add, that, for the most part, he rather laughs like Horace, than bites like Juvenal. Indeed his genius was of kin to both, but more nearly related to the former. Some diseases are curable by lenitives; to others corrosives are necessary. Can a man inveigh too sharply against the cruelty of tyrants, the pride and vanity of the great, the covetousness of the rich, the baseness of the Sophists, and particularly of the Cynics, (who, while they preach poverty to

The best judges have condemned Etairikoi Diagenuine. They are at any rate gross and devoid of logoi, or, "Dialogues of the Harlots," as not being

humour

others, are heaping up riches, and living in gluttony,) besides the wrangling of the sects amongst themselves about supreme happiness, which he describes at a drunken feast, and calls it the battle of the Lapitha.

Excepting what already is excepted, he seems to me to be an enemy to nothing but to vice and folly. The pictures which he draws of Nigrinus and of Demonax are as fair as that of virtue herself, if, as the philosopher said, she could wear a body. And if we oppose to them the lives of Alexander the false prophet, and of Peregrinus, how pleasingly, and with how much profit, does the deformity of the last set off the beauty of the first,

Some of his censurers accuse him of flatness and want of wit in many places. These I suppose have read him in some Latin translations, which, I confess, are generally dull; and this is the only excuse I can make for them. Otherwise they accuse themselves too manifestly for want of taste or understanding. Of this number is the wretched author of the Lucien en Belle Humeur, who being himself as insipid as a Dutch poet, yet arraigns Lucian for his own fault; introduces the ghost of Ablancourt, confessing his coldness in many places, the poorness of his thoughts, and his want of humour; represents his readers tired and yawning at his ill buffoonery and false mirth, and sleeping over his melancholic stories, which are everywhere stuffed with improbabilities. He could have said no worse of a Leyden slip.* The best on it is, the jaundice is only in his own eyes, which makes Lucian look yellow to him. All mankind will exclaim against him for preaching this doctrine; and be of opinion when they read his Lucian, that he looked in a glass when he drew his picture. I wish I had the liberty to lash this frog-land wit as he deserves, but when a speech is not seconded in Parliament, it falls of course; and this author has the whole senate of the learned to pull him down: incipient omnes pro Cicerone loqui.

It is to be acknowledged, that his best translator, Ablancourt, thinks him not a profound master in any sort of philosophy; but only that he skimmed enough from every sect, to serve his turn in rhetoric, which was his profession. This he gathers from his superficial way of arging. But why may not another man reply in his efence, that he made choice of those kinds of reasons which were most capable of being made to shine in his facetious way of arguing; and those undoubtedly were not the most knotty, nor the deepest, but the most diverting by the I presume, a cant phrase for a graft from that garden of knowledge.

sharpness of the raillery. Dr. Mayne, so often praised, has another opinion of Lucian's learning, and the strength of his witty arguments, concluding on that subject in these words, or near them: "For my part, I know not to whose writings we owe more our Christianity, where the true God has succeeded to a multitude of false,—whether to the grave confutation of Clemens Alexandrinus, Arnobius, Justin Martyr, St. Augustin, Lactantius, &c. or the facetious wit of Lucian." I cannot doubt but the treacherous translator would have given his hand to what the Englishman has said of their common author. The success has justified his opinion in the sight of all the world. Lucian's manner of convincing, was certainly more pleasant than that of the Christian writers, and we know the effect was full as powerful; so easily can the Eternal Wisdom draw good out of evil, and make his enemy subservient to the establishment of his faith.

I will not enlarge on the praises of his oratory. If we compare his style with the Greek historians, his contemporaries, or near his time, we shall find it much more pure than that of Plutarch, Dion, or Appian, though not so grave; because his subjects and theirs required to be treated after a different manner. It was not of an uniform web, says Mayne, like Thucydides, Polybius, and some others whom he names, but was somewhat peculiar to himself; his words well chosen, his periods round, the parts of his sentences harmoniously divided, a full flood or even a torrent of persuasion, without inequalities or swellings; such as might be put in equal comparison with the best orations of Demosthenes or Isocrates; not so dry as the first, nor so flowery as the last. His wit, says Ablancourt, was full of urbanity, that Attic salt, which the French call fine raillery; not obscene, not gross, not rude, but facetious, well-mannered, and wellbred: only he will not allow his love the quality last mentioned, but thinks it rustical, and according either to his own genius, or that of the age in which he lived.

If wit consists in the propriety of thoughts and words, (which I imagined I had first found out, but since am pleasingly convinced that Aristotle has made the same definition in other terms,) then Lucian's thoughts and words are always proper to his characters and his subject. If the pleasure arising from comedy and satire be either laughter, or some nobler sort of delight, which is above it, no man is so great a master of irony as our author. That figure is not only a keen, but a shining weapon in his hand; it glitters in the eyes of those it kills; his own gods, his greatest enemies, are not butchered

by him, but fairly slain: they must acknowledge the hero in the stroke, and take the comfort which Virgil gives to a dying captain :

Æneæ magni dextra cadis.

I know not whom Lucian imitated, unless it might be Aristophanes ; (for you never find him mentioning any Roman wit, so much the Grecians thought themselves superior to their conquerors;) but he, who has best imitated him in Latin, is Erasmus; and in French, Fontenelle, in his "Dialogues of the Dead," which I never read but with a new pleasure.

Any one may see, that our author's chief design was to dis-nest heaven of so many immoral and debauched deities; his next, to expose the mock philosophers; and his last, to give us examples of a good life in the persons of the true. The rest of his discourses are on mixed subjects, less for profit than delight; and some of

them too libertine.

The way which Lucian chose of delivering these profitable and pleasing truths, was that of dialogue: a choice worthy of the author; happily followed, as I said above, by Erasmus and Fontenelle particularly, to whom I may justly add a triumvir of our own,-the reverend, ingenious, and learned Dr. Eachard, who, by using the same method, and the same ingredients of raillery and reason, has more baffled the philosopher of Malmesbury, than those who assaulted him with blunt heavy arguments, drawn from orthodox divinity; for Hobbes foresaw where those strokes would fall, and leaped aside before they could descend; but he could not avoid those nimble passes, which were made on him by a wit more active than his own, and which were within his body, before he could provide for his

defence.

I will not here take notice of the several kinds of dialogue, and the whole art of it, which would ask an entire volume to perform. This has been a work long wanted, and much desired, of which the ancients have not sufficiently informed us; and I question whether any man now living can treat it accurately. Lucian, it seems, was very sensible of the difficult task, which he undertook in writing dialogues, as appears in his discourse against one who had called him Prometheus. He owns himself, in this particular, to be like to him, to whom he was resembled, to be the inventor of a new work, attempted in a new

The work alluded to, which was written by the Rev. Dr. John Eachard, (Master of Catharine Hall, in Cambridge, and author of the "Grounds of the Contempt of the Clergy,'") was published in 1671, and was entitled "Mr. Hobbe's State of Nature con. sidered; in a Dialogue between Philautos and Timothy."-Malone.

manner,-the model of which he had from none before him; but adds withal, that if he could not give it the graces which belong to so happy an invention, he deserves to be torn by twelve vulheart of that first man-potter. For, to quit the tures, instead of one, which preys upon the beaten road of the ancients, and take a path of his own choosing, he acknowledges to be a bold and ridiculous attempt, if it succeed not. "The mirth of dialogue and comedy in my work," says he, " is not enough to make it pleasing, because the union of two contraries may as well produce a monster as a miracle; as a centaur results from the joint natures of a horse and It is not but that from two excellent be

man.

ings a third may arise of perfect beauty; but it is what I dare not promise to myself; for dialogue being a solemn entertainment of grave discourse, and comedy the wit and fooling of a theatre, I fear that through the corruption of two good things, I have made one bad. But whatever the child be, it is my own at least; I beg not with another's brat upon my back. From which of the ancients should I have stolen or borrowed it? My chimeras have no other being, than my own imagination; let every man produce who can; and whether this be a lawful birth, or a misshapen mass, is left for the pres ent age, and for posterity, to judge.

This is the sense of my author's words contracted in a narrow compass; for, if you will believe Ablancourt, and others, his greatest fault is, that he exhausts his argument,—like Ovid, knows not when to give over, but is perpetually gallopping beyond his stage.

But though I cannot pursue our author any farther, I find myself obliged to say something of those translators of the following Dialogues, whom I have the honour to know, as well as of some other translations of this author, and a word or two of the translation itself.

As for the translators, all of them, that I know, are men of established reputation, both for wit and learning, at least sufficiently known to be so among all the finer spirits of the age. Sir Henry Sheers has given many proofs of his excellence in this kind; for while we, by his admirable address, enjoy Polybius in our mother tongue, we can never forget the hand that bestowed the benefit. The learning and judgment above his age, which every one discovers in Mr. Moyle, are proofs of those abilities he has shown in his country's service, when he was

This gentleman, whom our author has again mentioned with esteem, in the "Parallel of Poetry and Painting," (p. 330,) was the son of Sir WalHe ter Moyle, and was born in the year 1672. was educated to the study of law, and became a

chose to serve it in the senate, as his father had done. The wit of Mr. Blount, and his other performances, need no recommendation from me; they have made too much noise in the world to need a herald. There are some other persons concerned in this work, whose names deserve a place among the foremost, but that they have not thought fit to be known, either out of a bash ful diffidence of their own performance, or out of apprehension of the censure of an ill-natured and ill-judging age; for criticism is now become mere hangman's work, and meddles only with the faults of authors; nay, the eritic is disgusted less with their absurdities than excellence; and you cannot displease him more than in leaving him little room for his malice, in your correctness and perfection; though that indeed is what he never allows any man; for like the bed of Procrustes, they stretch or cut off an author to its length. These spoilers of Parnassus are a just excuse for concealing the name, since most of their malice is levelled more at the person than the thing; and as a sure mark of their judgment, they will extol to the skies the anonymous work of a person they will not allow to write common sense.

But this consideration of our modern critics has led me astray, and made me insensibly deviate from the subject before me; the modesty or caution of the anonymous translators of the following work. Whatever the motive of conceal ing their names may be, I shall not determine; but it is certain, nothing could more contribute to make a perfect version of Lucian, than a confederacy of many men of parts and learning to do him justice. It seems a task too hard for any one to undertake; the burden would indeed

member of Parliament in 1695. He composed a variety of treatises, on various subjects, which are comprised in a collection of three volumes 8vo, the last being posthumous. Mr. Moyle died in 1721.

Charles Blount, the son of Sir Henry, and brother to Sir Edward Pope Blount. He early appeared as a defender and admirer of Dryden, by publishing

an answer to Leigh's "Censure of the Rota on the

Conquest of Granada." It was entitled, "Mr. Dryden Vindicated, in Reply to the Friendly Vindication of Mr. Dryden, with Reflections on the Rota." Mr. Blunt distinguished himself as a friend to civil liberty during the crisis preceding the Revolution; but was still better known by the deistical tracts entitled, "Anima Mundi,"" Life of Appollonius Ty. aneus," "Diana of the Ephesians," and the "Religio Laici," which last he published anonymously in 1683, and inscribed to our author.

The death of Blount was voluntary. Having lost his wife, the daughter of Sir Timothy Tyrrel of Shotover, he fell in love with her sister, and being unable to remove her scruples upon the lawfulness of their union, shot himself in a fit of despair, in August, 1693. His miscellaneous works were pah. lished by Galden in 1695.

He was a man of deep and extensive reading, and probably better qualified, in point of learning, to iranslate Lucian, than most of his coadjutors.

be insupportable, unless we did what the French have done in some of their translations, allow twenty years to perfect the work, and bestow all the brightest intervals, the most sprightly hours, to polish and finish the work.* But this has not been the fate of our author hitherto; for Lucian, that is the sincere example of Attic eloquence, as Grævius says of him, is only a mass of solecism and mere vulgarisms in Mr. Spence.f I do not think it worth my while to rake into the filth of so scandalous a version; nor had I vouchsafed so much as to take notice of it, had it not been so gross an affront to the memory of Lucian, and so great a scandal to our nation. D'Ablancourt has taken a great deal of pains to furnish this intruder into print, with Lucian, in a language more known to him than Greek; nay, he has left him not one crabbed idiom to study for, since he has admirably clothed him in a garb more familiar to the moderns, still keeping the sense of his author in view. But in spite of all these helps, these leading-strings were not sufficient to keep Mr. Spence from falling to the ground every step he made; while he makes him speak in the style and language of a jack-pudding, not a master of eloquence, admired for it through all the ages since he wrote. But too much of this trifler.

I have said enough already of the version of the learned Dr. Mayne, to show my approbation of it; but it is only a select parcel of Lucian's Dialogues which pleased him most, but far from the whole. As for any other translation, if there be any such in our language, it is what I never saw, and suppose it must be antiquated, or of so inferior a degree, as not even to rival Spence.

The present translation, as far as I can judge by what I have seen, is no way inferior to Ablancourt's, and in many things is superior. It has indeed the advantage of appearing in a language more strong and expressive than French, and by the hands of gentlemen who perfectly understand him and their own language.

This has brought me to say a word or two about translation in general; in which no nation might more excel than the English, though, as matters are now managed, we come so far short of the French. There may indeed be a reason assigned, which bears a very great

• This, and two or three other passages, show that this life was written hastily, and that it had not been carefully revised by the author.- Malone.

↑ Ferrand Spence, who published a translation of Lucian's Dialogues in four volumes, 8vo., in 1684. 1 Francis Hickes published a translation of Select Dialogues from Lucian, 4to. 1634.