forgery than in the inscriptions on Greek temples, and letters might have been called Cadmean by the Theban priests merely because they were not cut quite in the modern fashion. But the works of Homer supply the most satisfactory proof that he neither wrote himself, nor knew anything of such an art. The supposed references to that art in the Iliad, when critically examined, are utterly worthless, and it is not to be supposed that, had letters been in common use in the days of Homer, he should have systematically abstained from any mention of an invention so closely interwoven with the every-day commerce of human life. But even supposing the invention of letters in Greece to have been as old as Cadmus, and Cadmus to be as old as artificial constructive chronologers would make him, this will be very far from helping Homer to the modern use of pen and ink. Those who have observed how very slow and far between are the successive steps in the discovery and progress of the arts of human life, will understand that the invention of an alphabet is one thing, and its application to literature and the art of making books another and widely different thing. Judging by such analogies as history affords, it would require at least six hundred years to make writing general after letters were invented. We know, indeed, as a historical fact, that the Greek alphabet, as we now have it, was of the most slow and gradual growth, not having been completed till the year 403 B.C., in the archonship of Euclid.' The difficulty of getting proper materials for writing on in the early ages, would alone prevent the art, whenever invented, from becoming at first of extensive application. The notices which we have of Solon's wooden tablets, and of the old edition of Hesiod's 'Works and Days' on leaden tablets, which Pausanias saw Harpocration, 'Αττικὰ γράμματα. 1 at Ascra, sufficiently indicate the materials on which early Greek inscriptions were written ;1 for books most certainly in those early ages they had none. For what would have been the use of books to a people who never read? To write songs which they had never known but as sung by living men, would, to the contemporaries of Phemius and Demodocus, have appeared as a cold, heartless attempt to destroy them, and to rob them of their breath of life. In fact, even as to laws, and other grave public notices beyond the sphere of the wandering minstrel, we have the most undoubted statement from the Greeks themselves that written statutes were utterly unknown in Greece till the age of Zaleucus, that is, about seventy years before the time of Solon,2 and though Solon himself, about 600 years B.C., was not only a legislator but a poet, there was in fact no authorship, in our sense of the word, in Greece till the age of the Persian wars. This was the date of the birth of prose in the Greek language; and the whole history of popular civilisation in all countries proves that the general use of writing, as a medium of intellectual currency, is coeval with the existence of prose, while it is utterly foreign from the genius of those early ages, in which verse is the only organ of popular entertainment and instruction. In those times, poetry was not propagated from generation to generation in a dead written book, but through the living mouths of a class of public singers and reciters, called rhapsodists,3 a word to which, in later Greece, as to the word ooporns, an unfavourable meaning was attached, but which originally denoted a most respectable class of men, as 1 Plut. Vit. Sol. 25; Pausan. IX. 31. 2 Strabo vi. 259. Pind. Nem. 11. 1; Herod. v. 67, with 3 On the Rhapsodists, see Schol. edit. 1862. necessary to the intellectual culture of their age as orators, critics, and preachers to future stages of civilisation. In these men the cultivation of memory was necessarily the great art by which they practised their profession and gained their livelihood; and this necessity will explain to the modern reader the preservation of long poems, through memory alone, in an age when writing was either entirely unknown, or known only as a means of perpetuating short public inscriptions on metal, wood, or stone. Nothing is more fallacious than the practice of measuring the intellectual capacities of men in the early stages of culture, by the feats of which we, in a more advanced state of civilisation, are capable. With all our culture, the mere savage is, in some respects, before us; he has a quicker eye and a more vivid imagination; and, in the living power of ready memory, all nations, before the invention of writing, largely surpassed themselves in their afterstage of a purely literary culture. But though there was nothing to hinder the rhapsodists from handing down from generation to generation long poems consisting of several cantos, it was a method of transmission particularly liable to corrupting influences; and to such influences, doubtless, we owe the extensive interpolations in the Homeric text, which will never fail to reveal themselves to the sharp inspection of an intelligent criticism. But more than this, the whole fashion and habit of hearing poems sung or recited in those early times, renders the idea impossible that any such long poems as the Iliad and Odyssey should ever have been composed. The memory of some individual poet might perhaps have been equal even to this feat; but as there was no demand in the age for any such exhibition of mnemonic power, it is absurd to suppose that it ever should have been called forth. Men do not make boats too large for the water that is to float them, nor compose tragedies of twenty acts when they know that people will with difficulty listen to five. Homer therefore simply did not write those two large poems which now pass under his name, in their present shape and to their present extent, and that because the age to which he belonged would not have known what to make of them; and further, because it is extremely improbable that even his genius should have been equal to such a stupendous feat. If common sense and a quick practical instinct have ever been a distinguishing quality of the highest class of poets, as distinguished from mere blowers of imaginative soap-bubbles, Homer, as a practical man, could never dream of attempting what, if achieved, could be of no use to the men in whose service he spent his life. As for the unity of the Iliad, on which Aristotle has descanted so learnedly, and which so many consider so irrefragable a proof of the presence of one mind through its whole structure, this unity, though unquestionably, in a certain sense, existing, lies in the very nature of the subject much more than in the genius of the poet. If any man were to collect the ballads now current in Britain about Robin Hood, or the traditions of the life of Sir William Wallace, or other popular hero, he would find that there is a unity in such themes that grows up spontaneously in the popular mind, and which requires no genius of a first-class poet to produce it. Besides, whatever Aristotle may have said, it is he only who has said it, and imposed artificial laws on our modern judgments; for the fact is that the Greeks generally did not recognise that strict unity of plan in the Iliad which the Stagirite so highly lauds, and they found the actual contents of the poem much wider than the plan Thomas Carlyle informed me that he knew the bookseller-a Yorkshire man-who actually performed the part of Pisistratus to these ballads. announced in the exordium requires. In fact, that people, with all their wonderful intellectual feats, knew nothing of works executed with a strict consciousness of literary unity till the time of Xenophon; and as to the Iliad, in spite of the much be-praised unity, there are in it not a few staring gaps— "eminentes et hiantes commissura"--which betray the hand of an unskilful joiner; and if these clumsy sutures have not always been readily allowed by students of Homer, but rather studiously concealed, it is because the transcendental admiration of a great genius has prevented men from seeing the truth, and because all men at all times are much more inclined to put incoherent things together than to break up into separate parts an already existing coherency. Of these flaws in the structure of the poem, the reappearance of Pylemenes after he is dead (xiii. 658, and v. 576), and the whole passage in Iliad xviii. from ver. 356 to 368, are glaring examples. And of this, to a certain extent at least, inorganic structure of the poem, as we now have it, the account of its early history as given by the Greeks themselves is a complete confirmation. For, so far from asserting the existence. of one or two large poems possessed of organic unity from the earliest times, they do in express terms declare the contrary. Thus Ælian says: "The poems of Homer were sung by the ancients originally in separate parts; and it was only after a long time that Lycurgus brought the whole body of the Homeric poetry with him to Sparta on his return from Ionia. In later times, Pisistratus made a collection of the rhapsodies, and published the Iliad and the Odyssey in their present shape." The same account is given by Cicero for “Consentiunt enim omnes Gramma- | legomena, p. 123); certainly a much tici in Iliade contineri gesta Græcorum more wide and less organic scheme et Trojanorum ad Ilium, et, si quid than the mere wrath of Achilles. addunt, fortia facta Achillis" (Pro |