'I admire you for what you say of the fierce fighting "Iliad"... I am afraid this poem, noble as it truly is, has done infinite mischief for a series of ages; since to it, and its copy the "Eneid", is owing, in a great measure, the savage spirit that has actuated, from the earliest ages to this time, the fighting fellows that, worse than lions or tigers, have ravaged the earth, and made it a field of blood'.