the nobler beauties of Grecian literature, which no verbal critic could possibly have the soul to comprehend, they exhaust their lives in nibbling upon the metres of a Greek play, or in collecting various readings, and disturbing the sense of some noble composition. This is the trifling which, with many, has brought ancient literature itself into disesteem. They witness the egregious folly of certain pompous scholars, excisemen who gauge the barrels of antiquity, but never taste the wine, and conclude, not, it must be confessed, without some appearance of reason, that that time must surely be wasted which is set apart for the acquirement of Greek.

The best view we have seen of this controversy is contained in the Appendix to Dr. Priestly's 'Lectures on Oratory and Criticism,' No. iv., edited by Mr. J. T. Rutt. It is from the pen of Mr. Talfourd, and is extracted from an article first published in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana.' As, in combating the sophistry of his antagonists, Mr. Talfourd would not, of course, be thought to contend with a shadow, he very politely allows that the hypothesis of MM. Heyne and Wolf, the chief of those who maintain that the Iliad' and 'Odyssey' were not composed by one individual, however startling it might have seemed formerly, is not now to be treated with neglect or disdain. If he comes to this conclusion from any consideration for the learning or acuteness of its supporters, though he afterwards proves that neither their acuteness nor their learning could preserve them from advocating the most outrageous absurdity, we confess our inability to imitate his example; for, in our estimation, the more ingenuity they display in defence of a ridiculous position, the more contemptible should they be considered.

The best confutation of this hypothesis is its own chronology. It was not thought of until more than a thousand years after Homer's time, when all the materials for establishing it were as scanty as they are now. Herodotus, who wrote the Life of Homer'; Plato, who attempted at first to rival him; and Aristotle, who profoundly venerated his genius, and has left us the best commentary existing on his works; these, whose knowledge and capacity were as superior to Wolf's and Heyne's as the sun is to a rushlight, never once found room to doubt of Homer's individuality. Persons of sound and powerful intellect seldom descend, indeed, into inquiries of this kind, too hopelessly obscure to yield any satisfaction, and, if they were not obscure, much too insignificant to tempt any but mere scholars to pursue them.

It is, of course, easy enough to interweave, with a dissertation on such a subject, abundance of curious matter on the origin of alphabetical writing; on the manner in which the ancient rhapsodists passed their lives; on the Grecian character, as it was developed in the heroic ages; on antiquity in general; on poetry, and so on; and these things may be arranged and treated in a way which will

give the disquisition an air of novelty; but, then, what end will all this answer? Is the understanding of the reader enlightened by it? Is his imagination warmed? Is he taught to think? Is learning raised in his estimation? On the contrary, no one beyond the precincts of youth, who has in the least made antiquity his study, could possibly learn, from such inquiries, a single new truth, scarcely one historical fact, which he did not before know. The world is now delivered over to a plague more grievous than any in old times inflicted on the Egyptians,-the plague of bookmaking; but it never appears with more fearful symptoms than when it assumes the shape of classical book-making. Under the influence of this malady, men project eternal new editions of books already more numerous than their readers, and generally for no other reason than that they have, in running through a certain author, penned a few remarks upon the margin, which they do themselves the honour to think should not be lost. Heyne himself is not guilty of short annotations; his Commentary on Homer is nearly twenty times as voluminous as the work itself, and contains, we may suppose, the remnants of his common-place book for many years. Confiding in these phalanxes of notes, he imagines himself qualified to transform Homer into a phantom, just as he makes his text vanish among the multitude of his Excursions and Annotations.

Mr. Talfourd has condensed and arranged the arguments of these Zoiluses in a manner which does great credit to his ingenuity, but even in his synopsis they are much too prolix to be admitted here. We shall state them in very few words, and we grudge even those few to arguments so preposterous and sophistical in our estimation. Wolf and Heyne, then, contend that the Iliad' and 'Odyssey' are the productions of various rhapsodists, first, because it is extremely improbable that in those days any one man should have been found capable of giving birth to such poems; second, they dwell on the improbability that works of such length should have been preserved without writing, as the Iliad' and 'Odyssey' seem to have been up to the time of Lycurgus; for previously, at least in Homer's time, it is not probable that writing was at all known in Greece; thirdly, they observe that the rhapsodists did not recite from any writings, but from memory; that the 'Iliad' and the Odyssey' were preserved by those rhapsodists; therefore, they were not preserved any where in writing; and, fourthly, that the poems have not that strict unity which they would exhibit were they the compositions of one man, and that the little now apparent in them is entirely owing to their Spartanı or Athenian editor: but here the critics break off into little schisms, Heyne disputing the unity of some parts only, while he admits the general unity; and Wolf denying altogether the unity of the Iliad,' but allowing that of the 'Odyssey'; fifthly, that even in the poems, as we now have them, many parts are spurious, which

shows the negligence of the Athenian editor, who, in collecting and arranging the rhapsodies, was not careful to exclude all corrupt passages.

We would very willingly, if our space admitted it, reply to these arguments in the forcible and convincing language of Mr. Talfourd, who displays, however, in his confutation, somewhat too much of the coldness of a professional advocate. Not that the expressions themselves are frigid or deficient in confidence, but that they are introduced with,- On the other side, the following arguments may be adduced,' &c., which is a very poor exordium to a thing intended to be strongly persuasive.

In endeavouring to show the futility of the critical scepticism which pretends to doubt of the personal existence of the great Greek poet, we, of course, lay no claim to the slightest originality, or even imagine ourselves capable of stating the usual arguments better than they have already been stated: we are satisfied with presenting them to our readers in much fewer words, and without that parade of learning which, to many, is mere mystery and oracle. To the first argument, therefore, we reply that, undoubtedly they who advance it appear to be little acquainted with the history of human nature. Poetry, which is the language of imagination and passion, has always in every country preceded all other kinds of composition, and where it has found a language adequate to its conceptions, has invariably risen to greatest sublimity during those periods in which society exhibits with least disguise the passions and energies which belong to man. Learned men, who consume their lives in their closets, observing the obscure movements of their own minds, or comparing the opinions and knowledge of other philosophers, are not the persons to paint manners and the signs and effects of passion, which to them are generally or wholly unknown, as the fury and tossing of the wintry deep to the inland peasant, who never approached the shore. To describe vividly and truly the vehement perturbation, the contentions, the menaces, the revenge, the fury, the desperate struggles, the rage, the changefulness, the fierce repentance, of barbarous warriors, would be impossible to a refined mind and accomplished scholar, unless he had likewise dwelt long among those tumultuous beings, both in war and peace, and there studied their language and their manners. Homer, according to ordinary belief, was one of those men whose profession it was to delight with the charms of music and verse, those heroic but unpolished soldiers whose virtues and vices he has described. His reception, wherever he travelled, must always have depended upon his capacity to administer pleasure to his auditors, and this being the sole occupation and study of his life, his patrimony, his bread, his only instrument for achieving fame, (which we may gather from his poems he vehemently coveted,) it is not at all unnatural nor unreasonable to conclude, that

no degree of excellence was beyond his reach, or unlikely to be attained by him.

But if it be unreasonable to believe that ages so barbarous and so ignorant, as we are fond of representing the heroic times, could produce a poet of genius so unrivalled as the author of the Iliad undoubtedly is, is it less unreasonable to imagine that those ages could give birth to twenty Homers of equal capacity? as they must imagine who maintain the new hypothesis, since that the poems were composed in those ages it is impossible to deny. Our critics, however, merely through a love of paradox and an affectation of singularity, exhibit a degree of perverseness and crookedness of intellect entirely inconceivable to an ingenuous mind. • When they wish,' says Mr. Talfourd, to represent it as impossible that, in a rude age, the Iliad and Odyssey should have been produced in a connected form, they enlarge on the art with which they are constructed: when they desire to take away the effect of the reasoning that their completeness shows them to have been the production of one mind, they deny that there is any art at all, and laboriously endeavour to show that they only relate events in a natural order, and are not modelled on any artificial rules.'

In answer to the argument founded on the supposition that when the Iliad and Odyssey were composed, the use of letters was unknown in Greece, we reply,-prove that alphabetical writing was unknown at that period; for, until this be set clearly at rest, it is absurd to ground any objection at all upon it. For our part, in default of positive testimony, we are disposed to think that the very production of these perfect poems is a proof that, when and by whomsoever they were composed, they were produced in a langnage refined by writing, and therefore were themselves written. That we know little or nothing of those times, but what we learn from the very poems in question, ought, one would think, among modest and sincere inquirers after truth, to furnish a very powerful reason for abstaining from dogmatizing on the subject. The use of writing was undoubtedly well known to nations with whom the Greeks had had commercial relations long before the Trojan war; Minos, the great law-giver of Crete, who likewise flourished before that era, published his laws in writing; there were Cretans at the siege of Troy; the traditions of Greece ascribe the invention of three letters of the Greek alphabet to Palamedes, the Generalissimo of the army, before Agamemnon; Homer travelled in Asia, the country, in all probability, of his birth, and there is every thing, but positive demonstration, to prove that he was in Egypt; upon what evidence, therefore, do those learned Thebans, the Wolfs and the Heynes, assert, in the teeth of all these circumstances, that Homer was ignorant of the art of writing? If we are not entirely mistaken in this matter, this strolling old bard, this man who could neither write nor read, this rhapsodist who never

saw a beta or a digamma, might, nevertheless, have taught these learned gentlemen a great many secrets in the art of composition. But, letting this pass, who is it that has told them the heroic Greeks were ignorant how to write their names? What ancient historian has asserted it? Let the reader preserve his gravity, while we whisper to him the mighty authority of MM. Heyne and Wolf, that authority, upon which Aristotle and Herodotus are to be convicted of ignorance and falsehood, upon which all antiquity is to be disbelieved, upon which history, and tradition, and reason and common sense are to be set at nought, was—a Jew! Nothing better. We know, very well, says Bishop Burnett, that in matters of religion and prophecy the Jews were so famous that it seemed as if those things were inherent in their soil; but as to learning or science, or philosophy, or art, no barbarians of the ancient world were more notoriously ignorant. So that the assertion of Apollonius, however bitter, must be nevertheless allowed to be true, that of all mankind the Jews were the most unintellectual, and the only nation upon earth which had made no discovery useful to humanity. They were surrounded by celebrated nations, the Egyptians, the Phenicians, the Persians, the Greeks, but always remained neglected and unknown, or known only to be carried into bondage and captivity. How, therefore, should the writers of such a nation, cut off from the world by their unsocial institutions, and more unsocial character, presume to decide with any face of authority upon the antiquities of a people like the Greeks, the most profoundly learned and philosophical that has ever yet existed? But, more than this, Josephus, the Jewish historian, besides having no means that we have not, of knowing any thing of those remote times, is a writer repeatedly convicted of falsehood and the most contemptible credulity; nay, in matters which we may suppose Moses to have actually witnessed himself, he positively contradicts that ancient lawgiver and historian. We may therefore easily perceive the value of conclusions founded on the testimony of such a writer, ignorant, in the first place, of the facts of which he has the arrogance to speak, and unworthy of credit, even had he possessed opportunities, which he did not, of thoroughly investigating the question.

But even should we grant, for the sake of argument, (that which in fact cannot be granted without flying in the face of all antiquity,) that the Iliad' and Odyssey' were preserved, not in writing, but in the memory of the rhapsodists or bards, with whom memory was an art and a profession; would it follow, that the poems could not have been the work of one man, or could not have been transmitted in their completeness and purity from one generation to the next? It is a fact which need not be insisted on, that men, when their lives and fortunes depend on any particular art or science, will apply more rigorously to that thing, and will make more progress in it, too, than other men, who only take it up, among other things, for