harmony of style, and the great talent of speaking to the heart and passions, which Fenelon possessed, was unknown to Terrasson. I am not surprised that Homer was admired by the one and criticized by the other." Indeed Terrasson is better known, at least in this country, as a second Zoilus, than as the author of Sethos.

Besides its intrinsic merit, the romance of Sethos is curious, as being the foundation of the hypothesis concerning the 6th book of the Æneid maintained by Warburton in his Divine Legation of Moses, which was first published in 1738, seven years after the appearance of Sethos. Servius, one of the earliest commentators on Virgil, had long ago remarked, that many things in the Æneid were delivered according to the profound learning of the Egyptian theology (Multa per altam scientiam theologicorum Ægyptiorum). This idea is carried on through the whole of Terrasson's description of the subterranean dwellings of the Egyptian priests, and the initiation of his hero. "Mais on voit clairement dans les trois epreuves du feu, de l'eau et de l' air, les trois purifications que les ames doivent essuyer avant que de reyenir a la vie, et que le plus grand poete des Latins a empruntées dans le sixieme livre de son

Eneide infectum eluitur scelus aut exuritur igni, sans omettre la circonstance de la suspension a l'air agité ou aux vents: Le fleuve d'oubli et la porte d'ivoire y ont leur place." And again, "J'aurois lieu de faire ici une invocation semblable a celles des poetes qui entreprennent une description des Enfers.-Qu'il me soit permis de reveler les choses qu' J'ai apprises, et de mettre au jour ce qui se passoit dans les entrailles de la terre et sous le voile impenetrable du plus profond silence. A peine Sethos fut il descendu dans le souterrain du coté du temple superieur, qu' il fut extremement surpris d' entendre des cris d' enfans. Orphée qui en avoit ete surpris comme lui, supposa depuis que les enfans morts a la ma melle etoient placés a l' entrée des enfers;"

Continuo auditæ voces, vagitus et ingens,
Infantumque animæ flentes in limine primo;
Quos dulcis vitæ exortes, et ab ubere raptos
Abstulit atra dies, et funere mersit acerbo,

En avancant Sethos se trouva dans un lieu enchanté qu'on appelloit l'Elisée. Ici comme le jour tomboit d'une hauteur de cent quarante pieds, il etoit affoibli; et l'ombre des arbres dont

ce jardin etoit rempli l' affoiblissant encore, il sem bloit que l'on ne jouissoit en plein jour que d' un clair de Lune. C'ést ce qui fist naitre a Orphée la pensée de donner a l' Elisée un Soleil et des astres particuliers:"

Solemque suum sua sidera norunt.

Terrasson, however, declares, that the allegories of the Egyptians " sont peu de chose en comparaison des mysteres de Ceres institués a Eleusine sur le modele de ceux d' Isis." Now Warburton, in the second book of his Divine Legation, while inculcating that all legislators have confirmed the belief in a future state of rewards and punishments by the establishment of mysteries, contends that the allegorical descent of Æneas into hell was no other than an enigmatical representation of his initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries, "which came originally from Egypt, the fountain head of legislation." On this system he attempts to show that the whole progress through Tartarus and Elysium is symbolically conformable to what has been ascertained concerning the mysteries. This appropriation of Warburton was first remarked by Cooper in his Life of Socrates, where

he says, "Warburton supposes the whole sixth book of the Eneid to be a description of the Eleusinian mysteries, which, though he lets it pass for his own, was borrowed, or more properly stolen, from a French romance, entitled the Life of Sethos." Gibbon, in his Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of the Æneid, where he completely refutes Warburton's hypothesis, remarks, that "Some have sought for the Poetic Hell in the mines of Epirus, and others in the mysteries of Egypt. As this last notion was published in French six years before it was invented in English, the learned author of the Divine Legation has been severely treated by some ungenerous adversaries. Appearances, it must be confessed, wear a very suspicious aspect; but what are appearances," he sarcastically subjoins, "when weighed against his lordship's declaration, that this is a point of honour in which he is particularly delicate, and that he may venture to boast that no author was ever more averse to take to himself what belonged to another (Letters to a late Professor of Oxford.)? Besides, he has enriched this mysterious discovery with many collateral arguments which would for ever have escaped all inferior critics. In the case of Hercules, for

instance, he demonstrates that the initiation and the descent to the shades were the same thing, because an ancient has affirmed that they were different."