Chapter 5

Notes

1. 16

   Or, “is of a fiery nature.”

2. 17

   See the Republic, x. 2. By the Platonic doctrine, the ideas of things in the mind of God were the realities; the things themselves, as seen by us, were the images of these realities; and poetry, therefore, describing the images of realities, was only at the third remove from nature. As Plato puts it briefly in this same passage, “the painter, the bed-maker, God—these three are the masters of three species of beds.”

3. 18

   Iliad, xv. 192.

4. 19

   i.e., from Homer; using Homer’s words as suggestive and confirmatory of his doctrine.

5. 20

   Iliad, xiv. 246.