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there is no need we should say much: there is nothing hard in the inside of an olive, nothing [hard] in the outside of a nut. We are arrived at the highest pitch of success [in arts]: we paint, and sing, and wrestle more skillfully than the annointed[1] Greeks. If length of time makes poems better, as it does wine, I would fain know how many years will stamp a value upon writings. A writer who died a hundred years ago, is he to be reckoned among the perfect and ancient, or among the mean and modern authors? Let some fixed period exclude all dispute. He is an old and good writer who completes a hundred years. What! one that died a month or a year later, among whom is he to be ranked? Among the old
- ↑ Unctis. This is by no means a general, unmeaning epithet; but is beautifully chosen to express the unwearied assiduity of the Greek artists. For the practice of anointing being essential to their agonistic trials, the poet elegantly puts the attending circumstance for the thing itself. And so, in speaking of them as uncti, he does the same as if he had called them “the industrious, or exercising Greeks;” which was the very idea his argument required him to suggest to us. Hurd.
