Thus Rabelais in France, and Cervantes in Spain, overturned at the same time the dominion of monkery and chivalry, employing no other weapons but ridicule, the natural contrast of human terror.
The people laughed, and felt reassured.

So 'Telemachus' appeared, and recalled men back to the harmonies of nature.
"Poets," says Hazlitt, "are a longer-lived race than heroes: they breathe more of the air of immortality.

They survive more entire in their thoughts and acts.

We have all that Virgil or Homer did, as much as if we had lived at the same time with them.

We can hold their works in our hands, or lay them on our pillows, or put them to our lips.
Scarcely a trace of what the others did is left upon the earth, so as to be visible to common eyes.