[ 512 ] [Nor. 



HOMER: THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY. 



A half-mad Greek has lately written a volume to persuade the 

 world that he has at length made the discovery of the true author of the 

 Iliad. This author, who has evaded such a host of inquirers in every 

 age, from the days of Solon down to the days of Payne Knight, is no 

 other than Ulysses, the man of craft, who took Penelope to wife, con- 

 trived to escape the swords of Hector and his men at arms, which laid 

 low so many of his gallant countrymen, waS shipwrecked and " agitated 

 over so many seas," returned, found his Penelope as virtuous, fond, 

 and deep in tapestry weaving, as in the hour he left her : and having 

 nothing else to do in his monarchy of Ithaca, whicli at present employs 

 the diplomatic functions of a British corporal and a dozen men, busied 

 his leisure in writing the history of the " Late War under Agamemnon," 

 as commander-in-chief, assisted by documents from head-quarters, and 

 the personal comnumications of several officers on the staff of the grand 

 army. 



But leaving this Greek discoverer to settle his claims with the gover- 

 nors of St. Luke's, the subject is curious and cloudy enough to exercise 

 the best skill of modern inquiry. 



This inquiry will probably be found, whatever other elucidations it 

 may produce, to conclude with the following propositions — that the two 

 matchless poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey were the work of one man 

 — that they were preserved in writing in the Greek colonies along the 

 eastern border of the JMediterranean — that the Athenian Pisistratus, a 

 man of cultivated mind, seeing the confusion into which those poems 

 had fallen in Greece, by the habit of the rhapsodists, or reciters, — to 

 break them up into fragments for popular recitation, and interpolate 

 them with absurdities of their own, collected them, and brouglit them 

 back into their original shape, a task in which he was assisted and directed 

 by the use of authentic copies of the originals procured from the Greek 

 colonies in Asia JMinor. 



We may first very briefly cast aside the notorious hypothesis of the Ger- 

 man school of Wolf and Heyne, tliat the lUad and Odyssey were written 

 by a dozen, or a hundred dozen of rhymers, and finally compacted into 

 their present form by some collector. The Germans are a heavy peo- 

 ple, and so conscious of their heaviness, that they are always labouring to 

 appear light. A harlequin, with wooden legs, is their true emblem, and 

 fantastic dulness their true spirit. Heyne has the frivolous stupidity to 

 expose himself to the world's laughter by wisdom of this kind — " Jam 

 ingenium iUud praeclarum, cui compagem hancce miras artis debemus, 

 nobis Homervis esto." — (Hom. 7 8, p. 806.) Tlie idea is jdtogetlier 

 nonsense. The consecutive action, the similarity of style, and, above 

 all, the brilliant and vivid genius which has made every age bow to the 

 supremacy of Homer, vindicate the immortal work and the immortal 

 author, from twenty generations of Goths and Vandals. 



The only attempt at argument on wliich this hypothesis relies, is the pre- 

 sinned difficulty of proving tliat the art of writing existed in the age of 

 Homer. But it is clear that, at least in Judea, writing was known long 

 before the time of IMoses, and was in common use. — (Numbers, v. 23, 

 Deut. xxiv. 1.) The Pentateuch was written about 1570yeai's before the 

 Christian sera. That, in Greece, prose works were not known before Phere- 

 cydeSj (B.C- 544) nor any laws conmiitted to writing before those of Draco, 



