This is the design and the mistake of a famous English work by the Rev. Mr. Spence, entitled, “Polymetis; or, An inquiry concerning the agreement between the works of the Roman poets and the remains of the ancient artists, being an attempt to illustrate them mutually from one another.”[[47]] Spence has brought to his work great classical learning and a thorough knowledge of the surviving works of ancient art. His design of using these as means to explain the Roman poets, and making the poets in turn throw light on works of art hitherto imperfectly understood, has been in many instances happily accomplished. But I nevertheless maintain that to every reader of taste his book must be intolerable.
When Valerius Flaccus describes the winged thunderbolts on the shields of the Roman soldiers,—
Nec primus radios, miles Romane, corusci
Fulminis et rutilas scutis diffuderis alas,
the description is naturally made more intelligible to me by seeing the representation of such a shield on an ancient monument.[[48]] It is possible that the old armorers represented Mars upon helmets and shields in the same hovering attitude that Addison thought he saw him in with Rhea on an ancient coin,[[49]] and that Juvenal had such a helmet or shield in mind in that allusion of his which, till Addison, had been a puzzle to all commentators.
The passage in Ovid where the wearied Cephalus invokes Aura, the cooling zephyr,—
“Aura ... venias ...
Meque juves, intresque sinus, gratissima, nostros,”
and his Procris takes this Aura for the name of a rival,—this passage, I confess, seems to me more natural when I see that the ancients in their works of art personified the gentle breezes, and, under the name Auræ, worshipped certain female sylphs.[[50]]
I acknowledge that when Juvenal compares an idle patrician to a Hermes-column, we should hardly perceive the point of the comparison unless we had seen such a column and knew it to be a poorly cut pillar, bearing the head, or at most the trunk, of the god, and, owing to the want of hands and feet, suggesting the idea of inactivity.[[51]]