If the hero's chief quality be
vicious--as, for example, the choler and obstinate desire of
vengeance in Achilles--yet the moral is instructive; and besides, we
are informed in the very proposition of the "Iliads" that this anger
was pernicious, that it brought a thousand ills on the Grecian camp.
The courage of Achilles is proposed to imitation, not his pride and
disobedience to his general; nor his brutal cruelty to his dead
enemy, nor the selling his body to his father. We abhor these
actions while we read them, and what we abhor we never imitate; the
poet only shows them, like rocks or quicksands to be shunned.
By this example the critics have concluded that it is not necessary
the manners of the hero should be virtuous (they are poetically good
if they are of a piece); though where a character of perfect virtue
is set before us, it is more lovely; for there the whole hero is to
be imitated. This is the AEneas of our author; this is that idea of
perfection in an epic poem which painters and statuaries have only
in their minds, and which no hands are able to express.
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