Victor Hugo'S Opinion of Certain Great Literary Men

Victor Hugo (who died in May, 1885) said that the greatest Pelasgian was Homer; the greatest Hellen, Aeschylus; the greatest Hebrew, Isaiah; the greatest Roman, Juvenal; the greatest Italian, Dante; and the greatest Briton, Shakspeare.

The name of Homer is the greatest in the history of epic poetry. He was an Asiatic Greek: seven cities claimed his birth, but he is supposed to have been born at Smyrna (one of the twelve cities of the Ionian Confederacy in Asia), which, ten times destroyed, has risen ten times to splendor. Almost every trace of the ancient city is now destroyed; but Smyrna is still the emporium of the Levant, and contains a hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants.

Homer lived some time between 1000 B.C. and 850 B.C.: this is as near as we can come to the date. He is called the greatest Pelasgian, though born at Smyrna, because Pelasgia was the name of that part of ancient Greece, now called Thessaly, where it is certain that the greater part of Homer's life was spent, and where he wrote his immortal epics, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey." "Seven cities claimed him dead, where Homer, living, begged his daily bread."

AEschilles, or AEschylus, was born at Eleusis in Attica (a kingdom in that part of Greece called Hella) in the year 525 B.C., and died at Gela in Sicily, 456 B.C. He is called the "Father of Tragedy," also "The Shakspeare of the Grecian Drama." He wrote ninety tragedies, forty of which won public prizes. He was the first to erect a regular stage, with scenery and appropriate costumes. He was killed by the fall of a tortoise, dropped from the beak of an eagle, on his head.

Isaiah (Salvation) was one of the four greater Hebrew prophets.

We know not his name, nor of what tribe he was; but he was a prophet of the kingdom of Judah, and must have been an old man in the time of Hezekiah, who died 698 B.C. Smith says of him, "His mind is the most sublime and variously gifted instrument which the Spirit of God has ever employed to pour forth Its Voice upon the world."

Decimus Funius Fuvenalis was born in Aquinum; the exact date of his birth is unknown; but he was a youth in the time of Nero, who died in the year A.D. 68; and he was a writer between the years 81 and 117.

Juvenal, the Satirist of Indignation, and Horace, the Satirist of Ridicule, represent the two schools into which satire has been divided; and from one or the other every classical satirist of modern Europe derives his descent.

Among Dryden's masterpieces are his versions of five satires of Juvenal.

Dante (Durante Alighieri), one of the greatest poets of all time, and always the greatest among the Italians, was born in Florence, May 14, 1265, and died in Ravenna, Sept. 14, 1321.

His passionate and undying love for Beatrice, from the time he was nine years of age, became the fountain of the poetical inspiration of his life.

His immortal work, "The Divina Commedia," depicts a vision in which the poet is conducted, first, by Virgil, "the representative of human reason," through hell and purgatory; then by Beatrice, the representative of revelation; and finally by St. Bernard, through the several heavens, where he beholds the Triune God.

William Shakspeare was born April 23, 1564, at Stratford-on-Avon, in Warwickshire, England, and is the chief literary glory of that country.

He married Anne Hathaway, and had two daughters and one son: the latter did not survive his father.

The Germans have nationalized Shakspeare to such an extent, that their enthusiasm over him almost exceeds that of the English; and to them is due his title of "the poet par excellence of the whole world."

He died on his fifty-third birthday, in 1616.

As a dramatist, Shakspeare is without a peer; and only one or two poets can be named as ranking with him.

No edition of his plays was published until after his death. Many separate plays were rudely printed; but the first (folio) edition appeared in 1623, seven years after he died. The few remaining copies of this edition are very rare and costly.