but in his fertile invention and ingenious fabrication, [and with] which every one who heard him was delighted; and, in process of time, four or five centuries after his death, when his countrymen, the learned Greeks, possessing admirable memories and 'having,' some how or other, got an alphabet and being made capable to read and write, these delightful and ingenious compositions of our blind bard have, fortunately, come down to the present times, in the course of 2000 years or upward. When, therefore, translations have become common in, almost, every learned language, particularly, in our own, of which we are possessed of one so excellent that it has been, happily, said:
we are at liberty to conceive that the account of the Pygmies, as found in the Iliad, is there given and preserved, from ancient and established tradition and, possibly, recorded in history or celebrated in epic poetry, long before the time of Homer:
