:

Long flowing robes of purest white array
650 The nymph, that added luftre to the day:
A Tiar wreath'd her head with many a fold;
Her waste was circled with a zone of gold.
Forth issuing then, from place to place I flew;
Rouze man by man, and animate my crew.
655 Rife, rise my mates! 'tis Circe gives command;
Our journey calls us; haste, and quit the land.
All rife and follow, yet depart not all,
For fate decreed one wretched man to fall.
A youth there was, Elpenor was he nam'd,
660 Nor much for sense, nor much for courage fam'd;

The

v. 659. A youth there was, Elpenor was he nam'd.] Homer difmifles not the description of this house of Pleasure and Dr bauch, without thewing the Moral of his Fable, which is the ill confequences that attend those who indulge themselves in sensuality; this is fet forth in the punishment of Elpenor. He describes him as a perfon of no worth to shew that debauchery enervates our faculties, and renders both the mind and body incapable of thinking, or acting with greatness and bravery. At the fame time these circumftantial relations are not without a good effect; for they render the story probable, as if it were spoken with the veracity of an Hiftory, not the liberty of Poetry.

I will conclude this book with a Paragraph from Plutarch's 'Morals: It is a piece of advice to the Fair Sex, drawn from this ftory of Circe and Ulyffes." They who bait their hooks (says this Philofopher) with intoxicated drugs dr may catch fich with little. trouble; but then they prove dangerous to eat, and unpleasant to the tafte: Thus women who use arts to ensnare their admi. " rers, become wives of fools and madmen: They whom the forceress Circe enchanted, were no better than brutes; and the used "them accordingly, enclosing them with styes; but the lov'd Ulyf"ses entirely, whose prudence avoided her intoxications and " made

The youngest of our band, a vulgar foul
Born but to banquet, and to drain the bowl.
He, hot and careless, on a turret's height
With sleep repair'd the long debauch of night:
665 The sudden tumult stirr'd him where he lay,
And down he hasten'd, but forgot the way;
Full endlong from the roof the sleeper fell,
And snap'd the spinal joint, and wak'd in hell.
The reft crowd round me with an eager look;
670 I met them with a figh, and thus bespoke.
Already, friends! ye think your toils are o'er,
Your hopes already touch your native shore:
Alas! far otherwise the nymph declares,
Far other journey first demands our cares;
675 To tread th'uncomfortable paths beneath,
The dreary realms of darkness and of death:
To seek Tirefias' awful shade below,
And thence our fortunes and our fates to know..
My fad companions heard in deep despair;
680 Frantic they tore their manly growth of hair;

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" made his conversation agreeable, Those women who will not " believe that Pasiphae was ever enamour'd of a bull, are yet them<< selves so extravagant, as to abandon the society of men of sense " and temperance, and to betake themselves to the embraces of brutal and stupid fellows." Plut. Conjugal Precepts.

To earth they fell; the tears began to rain;
But tears in mortal miseries are vain.

Sadly they far'd along the sea-beat shore;

Still heav'd their hearts, and still their eyes ran o'er.

685 The ready victims at our bark we found,

The fable ewe, and ram, together bound.

For fwift as thought, the Goddess had been there,
And thence had glided, viewless as the air:

The paths of Gods what mortal can furvey? 690 Who eyes their motion, who shall trace their way?

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ELEVENTH BOOK

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ODYSSEY.

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The ARGUMENT.

The descent into Hell.

Ulyffes continues his Narration, How he arriv'd at the land of the Cimmerians, and what Ceremonies he perform'd to invoke the dead. The manner of his descent, and the Apparition of the Shades; his conversation with Elpenor, and with Tiresias, who informs him in a prophetic manner of his fortunes to come. He meets his mother Anticlea, from whom he learns the state of his family. He sees the shades of the antient Heroines, afterwards of the Heroes, and converses in particular with Agamemnon and Achilles. Ajax keeps at a sullen distance, and disdains to answer him. He then beholds Tityus, Tantalus, Sysiphus, Hercules; 'till he is deterred from further curiofity by the apparition of horrid Spectres, and the cries of the wicked in torments..

THE