hen Hymnen_, Leipzig, 1886), but have sometimes preferred a MS.
reading, or emendations by Mr. Tyrrell, by Mr. Verral, or the admirable
suggestions of Mr. Allen. My chief object has been to find, in cases of
doubt, the phrases least unworthy of the poets. Too often it is
impossible to be certain as to what they really wrote.

I have had beside me the excellent prose translation by Mr. John Edgar
(Thin, Edinburgh, 1891). As is inevitable, we do not always agree in the
sense of certain phrases, but I am far from claiming superiority for my
own attempts.

The method employed in the Essays, the anthropological method of
interpreting beliefs and rites, is still, of course, on its trial. What
can best be said as to its infirmities, and the dangers of its abuse, and
of system-making in the present state of the evidence, will be found in
Sir Alfred Lyall's "Asiatic Studies," vol. ii. chaps. iii. and iv.
Readers inclined to pursue the subject should read Mr. L. R. Farnell's
"Cults of the Greek States" (Clarendon Press, 1896), Mr. J. G. Frazer's
"Golden Bough," his "Pausanias," and Mr. Hartland's work on "The Myth of
Perseus." These books, it must be observed, are by no means always in
agreement with my own provisional theories.

ESSAYS INTRODUCTORY

THE SO-CALLED HOMERIC HYMNS

"The existing collection of the Hymns is of unknown editorship, unknown
date, and unknown purpose," says Baumeister. Why any man should have
collected the little preludes of five or six lines in length, and of
purely conventional character, while he did not copy out the longer poems
to which they probably served as preludes, is a mystery. The celebrated
Wolf, who opened the path which leads modern Homerologists to such an
extraordinary number of divergent theories, thought rightly that the
great Alexandrian critics before the Christian Era, did not recognise the
Hymns as "Homeric." They did not employ the Hymns as illustrations of
Homeric problems; though it is certain that they knew the Hymns, for one
collection did exist in the third century B.C. {4} Diodorus and
Pausanias, later, also cite "the poet in the Hymns," "Homer in the
Hymns"; and the pseudo-Herodotus ascribes the Hymns to Homer in his Life
of that author. Thucydides, in the Periclean age, regards Homer as the
blind Chian minstrel who composed the Hymn to the Delian Apollo: a good
proof of the relative antiquity of that piece, but not evidence, of
course, that our whol