As to my choice of the Analytic System for the purpose of illustrating Hesiod, I am not convinced by the argument either of the London or the Edinburgh Reviewer, that it is a system too extensive to serve for the illustration of a single author, or that my task was necessarily confined to literal explanation of the received mythology. In this single author are concentrated the several heathen legends and heroical fables, and the whole of that popular theology which the author of the New System professed to analyse. Tzetzes, in his scholia upon Hesiod, interpreted the theogonic traditions by the phenomena of nature and the operations of the elements: Le Clerc by the hidden sense which he traced from Phœnician primitives: and to these Cooke, in his notes, added the moral apologues of Lord Bacon. In departing, therefore, from the beaten track of the school-boy’s Pantheon, I have only exercised the same freedom which other commentators and translators have assumed before me. _Clifton, October, 1815._ FOOTNOTES [1] A blank-verse translation of the Battle of the Titans may be found in Bryant’s “Analysis:” and one of the descriptive part of “The Shield” in the “Exeter Essays.” Isaac Ritson translated the Theogony; but the work has remained in MS. [2] The untimely death of the writer unfortunately precludes me from offering my particular acknowledgments to the translator of Aristotle’s Poetics, for the large and liberal praise which he has bestowed upon my work in the second number of The London Review: a journal established on the plan of a more manly system of criticism by the respectable essayist, whose translations from the Greek comedy first drew the public attention to the unjustly vilified Aristophanes.