‘The most of our philosophers at present are, I believe, of the opinion of the smith in Herodotus, who might be excused for having that opinion at a time when perhaps no other heroic body had been discovered. But in later times, I believe there was not the most vulgar man in Greece, who did not believe that those heroes were very much superior, both in mind and body, to the men of after-times. Indeed, they were not considered as mere men, but as something betwixt gods and men, and had _heroic_ honours paid them, which were next to the _divine_. On the stage they were represented as of extraordinary size, both as to length and breadth; for the actor was not only raised upon very high shoes, which they called _cothurns_, but he was put into a case that swelled his size prodigiously (and I have somewhere read a very ridiculous story of one of them, who, coming upon the stage, fell and broke his case, so that all the trash with which it was stuffed, came out and was scattered upon the stage in the view of the whole people). This accounts for the high style of ancient tragedy, in which the heroes speak a language so uncommon, that, if I considered them as men nowise superior to us, I should think it little better than fustian, and should be apt to apply to it what Falstaff says to Pistol: “Pr’ythee, Pistol, speak like a man of this world.” And I apply the same observation to Homer’s poems. If I considered his heroes as no more than men of this world, I should consider the things he relates of them as quite ridiculous; but believing them to be men very much superior to us, I read Homer with the highest admiration, not only as a poet, but as the historian of the noblest race of men that ever existed. Thus, by having right notions of the superiority of men in former times, we both improve our philosophy of man and our taste in poetry.’—_Ancient Metaphysics_, vol. iii. p. 150. Footnote 53: