Letters concerning Homer The Sleeper in Horace: With Additional Classic Amusements

Book Description

Cambridge: Printed by J. Archdeacon, 1773. [iv], 349, [3]pp., 4to, including the last blank leaf. A large and pleasant copy in contemporary sprinkled calf, spine gilt; slightly rubbed but perfectly sound. First edition of this elegantly-printed series of “classic amusements,” arguing among other things that the Homer referred to by Horace was not that of The Iliad but the “Roman Homer” Quintus Ennius. Among other amusements are the author’s disputing Alexander Pope over the latter’s description of the ships of the Phaeacians, comparing the English government’s victories in the French and Indian wars to the labours of Hercules, the “Epistola ad Pisones de Arte Poetica not a Work of Horace,” and some charming short comparisons of elements in Shakespeare’s verse to classical authors, all to the Bard’s credit, even so far as to apply to him a quotation from his own Henry VIII: “He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one.” ESTC records nine copies in North America.

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