Greek.

Latin.

duties of an active and laborious profession. They are now amusements only, however delightful and improving. Far am I from assuming to understand all their riches, all their beauty, or all their power; yet I can profoundly feel their immeasurable superiority to all we call modern; and I would fain think that there are many even among my young readers who can now, or will hereafter, sympathize with the expression of my ardent admiration.

Greek-the shrine of the genius of the old world; as universal as our race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, of indefatigable strength, with the complication and the distinctness of nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian, speaking to the mind like English; with words like pictures, with words like the gossamer film of the summer; at once the variety and picturesqueness of Homer, the gloom and the intensity of Æschylus; not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, not fathomed to the bottom by Plato, not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up with all its ardors even under the Promethean touch of Demosthenes! And Latin-the voice of empire and of war, of law and of the state; inferior to its halfparent and rival in the embodying of passion and in the distinguishing of thought, but equal to it in

sustaining the measured march of history, and superior to it in the indignant declamation of moral satire; stamped with the mark of an imperial and despotizing republic; rigid in its construction, parsimonious in its synonymes; reluctantly yielding to the flowery yoke of Horace, although opening glimpses of Greek-like splendor in the occasional inspirations of Lucretius; proved, indeed, to the uttermost by Cicero, and by him found wanting; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive in its conciseness; the true language of History, instinct with the spirit of nations, and not with the passions of individuals; breathing the maxims of the world and not the tenets of the schools; one and uniform in its air and spirit, whether touched by the stern and haughty Sallust, by the open and discursive Livy, by the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus.

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

* I do not think any Greek could have understood, or sympathized with, Juvenal. Is it possible to put into Greek such lines as these? "Summum crede nefas animam præferre pudori,

Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas."-VIII. 83-4.

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 scepticism 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 com

posed. The decision of that question cannot in the slightest degree 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 scepticism 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