Plutarch and Longinus, but in opposition to the view of neo-classical criticism. Another example of cultivated and reflective poetry is to be found in Horace, who like Pindar in the pompous period of Greece composed his odes at the most "ostentatious" epoch of Roman history, the Augustan age. The Biblical literature would have given Vico materials of great value for the study of primitive poetry; and he actually did move a few steps towards it when he observed that poetry was the primitive language of all nations "including the Hebrews"; and that Moses made no use of the esoteric wisdom of the Egyptian priests and wrote his history "in a style which has much in common with that of Homer and often surpasses him in sublimity of expression." But Vico drops the subject at once, as if he instinctively guessed what might come of treating the Pentateuch as he had done the _Iliad,_ and Moses like Homer. So he prefers to wax enthusiastic over the phrase in which God describes himself to Moses _"Ego sum qui sum,"_ to which he ascribes a metaphysical profundity only attained by the Greeks when Plato conceived God as to_ on,_ and unknown to the Latins down to the latest period, for the word _ens_ is not pure Latin but belongs to debased Latin. Or he contents himself with emphatically pointing out that at a time when Greece was under the sway of a superstitious and natural law, God gave to his people a code "so full of weight as regards the dogmas of divinity and so full of humanity as regards the practice of justice, that not even in the humanest period of Greek history could a Plato have conceived or an Aristides executed it"; a code "whose ten chief enactments contain an eternal and universal justice founded upon the excellent conception of a purified human nature, and are capable of forming by habituation a character such as the maxims of the greatest philosophers could only with great difficulty form by ratiocination; whence Theophrastus called the Hebrews philosophers by nature." The success that attended the "will to believe" was all the more striking if as we suspect Vico had read the abhorred Spinoza's _Tractatus Theologico-politicus,_ where the Hebrew prophets, while their "piety" is recognised, are said to be entirely devoid of "sublime thoughts." Spinoza maintains that they only taught "very simple things which any one could easily discover, and adorned these with a style and supported them by reasons most calculated to move the mind of the multitude to devotion towards God"; and that the laws revealed by God to Moses were "nothing but the laws of the particular government of the Jews": and he sets out to examine the text of the Bible and the problem of the authenticity of the Pentateuch and the respective authors of its various books. We might almost venture to say that it was Spinoza's Biblical criticism that suggested to Vico his criticism of the composition and spirit of the Homeric poems; but that the latter, after passing in this way from