by the popular legends, seems grounded on every proof that in the circumstances could be reasonably required.

But

One only point remains--the most difficult, but happily the least important on this head-the date of Homer. Herodotus, as is well known, states that the poet lived about four hundred years before his own time; that is, in round numbers, about 850 B.C. But the most learned of the Greeks had no perfectly uniform story to tell on this matter, any more than on the Trojan war. They assigned various dates to Homer, between the earliest and the latest of which the interval is so great that at first sight one would think not even a probable approximation to the truth were possible. there were crotchety persons in ancient times as well as now; and peculiar extreme views on any subject, even when propounded by men of acknowledged talent and learning, unless supported by strong evidence and cogent argument, are always to be regarded with suspicion. When, therefore, we read that Crates of Mallus, the celebrated founder of the Pergamene school of criticism, who flourished about the middle of the second century before Christ, and who was unquestionably a great Homeric scholar, threw back the date of the poet to the very era of the Trojan war,2 and that Theopompus, the historian of Philip of Macedon, who wrote towards the end of the fourth century before Christ, placed an interval of five hundred years between the poet and that event, bringing the old minstrel in this way down into the clear day of chronological history, and making him contemporary with Archilochus, we shall not feel inclined to give any weight to such statements; for of these two extreme 1 See the passage quoted, page 14 τὸν εἰς τοὺς Τρωικούς χρόνους.-Proclus. περὶ Ομήρου.—Westermann.

above.

3

2 Οἱ δὲ περὶ Κράτητα ἀνάγουσιν αὐτ

3 Clem. Stromata, 1. 389; (Potter.) Euseb. Præpar. Evang. x. 11.

dates, the one is contrary to the well-known fact in literary history, that the popular epic, growing, as it does, by an accumulation of local traditions, requires time for its development, while the other confutes itself, by assigning a date for the poet so recent, that if it had been the real one, there never could have been any dispute about the matter. To bring Homer down into the era of the Olympiads is just as absurd as to transport Cadmus into the midst of the Trojan war, or, to use a topographical illustration, to bring the grey cone of Ben Ledi down to Stirling Castle, or the peaks of the Alps down to the plain of Piedmont. With the exception of these two extreme points, the apparent varieties of the other assigned dates, as Clinton justly observes, will be found on examination to be greater than the real. We shall, however, wisely content ourselves with remarking, that the date of Herodotus, with a free margin of some half a century, seems on the whole that date which agrees best both with the great majority of the authorities and with the nature of the case. The Roman writers place the poet about a century and a half before the foundation of Rome; and if we take our previous high road of the register of the Spartan kings, by the help of which we got the year 1100 B.C. for the Trojan war, and allow after this, according to the general tradition of the Greeks, some fifty or sixty years at least for the Æolic and Ionic migrations, with which the legends of the old Greek families came into Asia Minor; and further, add to this another half century to give the colonies time to settle, and to obtain that measure of outward prosperity which is neces

sary for the growth of the highest poetry, we shall have reached the year 900, when the wicked Ahab and the Phoenician Jezebel were misruling Israel, which tallies with the date of Herodotus, if we take it for the period of the poet's full and perfect manhood, and the zenith of his poetic powers. But of this enough. The most ancient Greek chronology is a matter about which no wise man will care to be curious. It is neither possible nor needful to know all things with the same degree of accuracy.1

For the materials belonging to this | obtainable. He is, besides, smitten to chapter I am principally indebted to an extreme degree with that transcenWelcker's Epic Cycle, Lauer's book dental admiration for Egypt, which, above quoted, and Clinton. Of course, from the days of Herodotus downat the present day, there was not much wards, has played so many strange to be got from Blackwell's Inquiry into pranks in the field of Hellenic research. the Life and Writings of Homer, Lon- Nevertheless the book is not without don, 1736, though Gladstone certainly permanent value in some respects, does not tell the whole truth about especially on account of the promiit when he says (i. 5), "No reader nence which the author gives to of Homer, in our time, would really, I Homer's character as a minstrel, not apprehend, be the poorer if every copy a literary poet, and the influence of of this book of Blackwell could be this great fundamental fact on the burned." So far as this sentence is character and style of the Homeric true, it is true of a thousand very good, poems. On this point I consider, as and in some respects very instructive will appear presently, that the learned books, which the progress of literary Aberdeen Principal has anticipated or scientific research has superseded. some of the most important results of More just unquestionably is the short Wolf's criticism; results not even now dictum of Heyne, with regard to the properly appreciated by Gladstone, Scotch scholar: "Blackwelli liber in Mure, Arnold, and the British school quo primas lineas melioris doctrinae generally. The book was translated ductas facile agnoscas."—(Præf. II. into German by T. H. Voss in 1776, XVI.) The book must be judged by which surely implies some merit. On the age in which the author lived, and this book Bentley is reported to have the contributions which he made to said that when he had gone through the branch of learning on which he half of it he had forgotten the beginwrote. With a very considerable ning, and when he had finished the amount of reading and scholarly cul- reading of it he had forgotten the ture, Blackwell was no doubt destitute whole. This is likely enough to have of that critical discrimination in the use been true; but Monck (Life of Bentof authorities, without which no trust-ley, p. 622) does not consider the anecworthy results in classical research are dote sufficiently vouched.

DISSERTATION IV.

ON THE EPIC MATERIALS OF HOMER-THE EPIC CYCLE.

THE preceding discussions have endeavoured to establish the reality of the Iliad as based on a historical fact, and the reality of its author as a historical personage. They have looked on the work as a book rather than as a poem, and its author as a man more than as a poet. We must now advance a step, and inquire into the action of the poet's mind as a builder of an imaginative structure from historical materials, where these materials come directly under those laws of ideal harmony which subordinate the actual to the beautiful and the sublime. And here the first question is, What were the epic materials that lay before Homer when he conceived the idea of his great work, and by what preference was he guided in the selection of his particular theme? Such a question, with regard to any famous work of poetic art, may not always be capable of a complete answer; but it is a question which the thoughtful student will always be inclined to put, and to which he will feel that a well-instructed expositor ought to be able to give an answer in so far satisfactory. Of course the particular genius of the poet will be an im portant element in such an inquiry; and in the biographies of modern poets of strongly-marked individuality, the working of this element will often appear in very interesting aspects,

VOL. I.

H

and under very instructive circumstances; but in the case of Homer the personal peculiarities of the poet are so unknown that we have no means of bringing into view any special influence which his genius may have exercised on the choice of his subject. We must therefore be content to know the man altogether from his works, and cannot, of course, employ an unknown element to explain the production of what, so far as our discussion has advanced, does not yet exist. Besides, in a future chapter we shall have cause to see that the genius of Homer and the genius of the Greek people are absolutely identical, so that any such personal inquiries as might reasonably occupy the critical historian of a Byron, a Wordsworth, a Shelley, a Coleridge, or a Browning, in the case of Homer cannot be started. What remains, therefore, for us to consider, is the mass of poetic material which lay before Homer, and the choice which he made of it; exactly as if, in the case of Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King,' an ardent student, wishing to explain their genesis, and to set forth their excellences, should set himself to review all the French, English, and Welsh collections of Arthurian romance with which our libraries are stored; or, if Milton's 'Paradise Lost' were the object of his critical study, in this case, over and above the particular bent of the poet's genius, he should inquire into these five things, both as composing the atmosphere which Milton breathed, and as affording a rich store of materials which he might employ-viz. (1.) Christianity; (2.) England; (3.) the Reformation and the Puritan theology; (4.) the Christian Scriptures, with the Talmudic traditions; (5.) the revival of letters, and classical learning. Without an accurate consideration of these five elements, it is impossible that any man should form a just estimate either of the character of the architecture of the