_Spectator_, No. 410. 'What signifies our
wishing?' wrote Dr. Franklin. 'I have sung that _wishing song_ a
thousand times when I was young, and now find at fourscore that the
three contraries have befallen me, being subject to the gout and the
stone, and not being yet master of all my passions.' Franklin's
_Memoirs_, iii. 185.
[66] He uses the same image in _The Life of Milton_ (_Works_, vii.
104):--'He might still be a giant among the pigmies, the one-eyed
monarch of the blind.' Cumberland (_Memoirs_, i. 39) says that Bentley,
hearing it maintained that Barnes spoke Greek almost like his mother
tongue, replied:--'Yes, I do believe that Barnes had as much Greek and
understood it about as well as an Athenian blacksmith.' See _ante_, iii
284. A passage in Wooll's _Life of Dr. Warton_ (i. 313) shews that
Barnes attempted to prove that Homer and Solomon were one and the same
man. But I. D'Israeli says that it was reported that Barnes, not having
money enough to publish his edition of _Homer_, 'wrote a poem, the
design of which is to prove that Solomon was the author of the _Iliad_,
to interest his wife, who had some property, to lend her aid towards the
publication of so divine a work.
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