These inestimable advantages, which no modern skill can wholly counterpoise, are known and felt by the scholar alone. He has not failed, in the sweet and silent studies of his youth, to drink deep at those sacred fountains of all that is just and beautiful in human language. The thoughts and the words of the master-spirits of Greece and Rome are inseparably blended in his memory; a sense of their marvellous harmonies, their exquisite fitness, their consummate polish, has sunken for ever in his heart, and thence throws out light and fragrancy upon the gloom and the annoyances of his maturer years. No avocations of professional labor will make him abandon their wholesome study; in the midst of a thousand cares he will find an hour to recur to his boyish lessons, to re-peruse them in the pleasurable consciousness of old associations and in the clearness of manly judgment, and to apply them to himself and to the world with superior profit. The more extended his sphere of learning in the literature of modern Europe, the more deeply, though the more wisely, will he reverence that of classical antiquity: and in declining age, when the appetite for magazines and reviews, and the ten-times repeated trash of the day, has failed, he will retire, as it were, within a circle of schoolfellow friends, and end his studies, as he began them, with his Homer, his Horace, and his Shakspeare.

HISTORY

OF THE

ORIGIN AND PRESERVATION

OF

THE ILIAD.

It is not strictly within the plan of this work to enter into any systematic discussion of the genuineness or the history of the several poems, the moral and poetical characters of which I have alone or principally proposed to myself to examine. Whether they were written by the persons whose names they bear in our days or not, their intrinsic merits, and, consequently, their rank in Greek literature, must remain the same, and be equally a worthy object of our studious inquiries. I might, perhaps, therefore have declined, without impropriety, any notice of what, for the sake of brevity, may be termed the Homeric Question; for, surely, except so far as the deep impression of early associations may render even a critical skepticism painful to the mind, it must be a matter of perfect indifference to us how or by whom the supposed works of Homer were really composed. The decision of that question cannot in the slightest de

gree affect our estimate of their quality. Whether all the poems that are now vulgarly attributed to Homer were his production, whether the Iliad and the Odyssey, both or one of them only, can lay claim to such parentage, or whether, lastly, any such person as Homer, or, indeed, any individual author of the former poem ever existed, whichever of these propositions be true, it seems to be a matter of little importance to those whose object is not to spell the inscriptions on mouldering monuments, but to inhale the breath of ancient grandeur and beauty amid the undoubted ruins of the great. The Iliad and the Odyssey exist; we have them in our hands, and we should not set them the less in honor though we were to doubt the impress of any Homer's hand, any more than we should cease to reverence the genius or the ruins of Rome, because shepherds or worse may have laid the first stone of her walls.

It is this very excellence, however, of the Homeric poetry, and the apparent peculiarity of the instance, together with the celebrity of the controversy, to which the skepticism of some modern scholars has given birth, that seem to compel me to devote a few pages to a notice of the points in question. I shall content myself, nevertheless, with stating shortly what has been urged against the genuineness of the verses, or at least of the present form, of the Iliad, referring the student to

the Introductions themselves for what affects the other Homeric poems, and leaving him to weigh the objections against his own prepossessions and to judge for himself.

I believe there is no trace of any doubt having ever been entertained of the personal existence of Homer, as the author of the Iliad, till the close of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, when two Frenchmen, Hedelin* and Perrault, first suggested the outlines of a theory respecting the composition of that poem, which has been since developed with such profound learning and such wonderful talent, by Heyne, that its original authors are now almost forgotten. The substance of this theory is, that whether any such person as Homer ever lived or not, the Iliad was not composed entirely by him or by any other individual, but is a compilation, methodized, indeed, and arranged by successive editors, but still a compilation of minstrelsies, the works of various poets in the heroic age, all having one common

* Hedelin denied that any such person as Homer ever existed, and maintained that the Iliad was made up ex tragœdiis et variis canticis de trivio, mendicorum et circulatorum, la manière des

chansons du Pontneuf." — Wolfe, Pro. 26, in not.

† Wolfe believed the verses now constituting the Iliad, to have been written (I should rather say, made or invented) by one Homer, but in short rhapsodies, unconnected purposely with each other, and that they were put together as after-mentioned. Much of his argument, however, of the impossibility of one man having composed the Iliad in form as we now have it, applies to the theory in the text.

theme and direction, the wars of Troy, and the exploits of the several Grecian chiefs engaged in them. And, however startling this theory may appear at first sight, however unlike any thing of which we may have heard, and however impossible in the age in which we now live, there are, nevertheless, some arguments in its favor that with all calm and serious inquirers will ever save it from indifference and contempt.*

It is said that the argument drawn from the apparently undoubting belief of the earliest as well as of the greatest writers of Greece, after the Homeric age, and from the general consent of all mankind in the same faith, ever since, proves too much, that besides the Iliad, Odyssey, Batrachomyomachia, Hymns, and Epigrams, at least twentyf other poems were in former times ascribed to Homer, that many passages of these poems

* Bentley expressed an opinion similar to Wolfe's on the history and compilation of the Iliad. "Homer wrote a sequel of Songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung by himself, for small earnings and good cheer, at Festivals and other days of merriment: the Iliad he made for the men, and the Odysseis for the other sex. These loose Songs were not collected together in the form of an Epic Poem till about 509 years after."-Letter to N. N. by Phileleuth. Lipsiens. s. 7.