h
and the like blasphemies against God they ceased not openly to
utter.

FOOTNOTES:

[U] _Westminster Review_, 1853.

[V] This essay was written 15 years ago.

[W] Here is the old stanza. Let whoever is disposed to think us too hard
on Captain Bethune compare them:--

'For Wetharrington my harte was wo,
That even he slayne sholde be;
For when both his leggis were hewen in to,
He knyled and fought on his knee.'

Even Percy, who, on the whole, thinks well of the modern ballad, gives
up this stanza as hopeless.

HOMER.[X]

Troy fell before the Greeks; and in its turn the war of Troy is now
falling before the critics. That ten years' death-struggle, in which the
immortals did not disdain to mingle--those massive warriors, with their
grandeur and their chivalry, have, 'like an unsubstantial pageant,
faded' before the wand of these modern enchanters; and the Iliad and the
Odyssey, and the other early legends, are discovered to be no more than
the transparent myths of an old cosmogony, the arabesques and frescoes
with which the imagination of the Ionian poets set off and ornamented
the palace of the heavens, the struggle of the earth with the seasons,
and the labours of the sun through his twelve signs.

Nay, with Homer himself it was likely at one time to have fared no
better. His works, indeed, were indestructible, yet if they could not be
destroyed, they might be disorganised; and with their instinctive hatred
of facts, the critics fastened on the historical existence of the poet.
The origin of the poems was distributed among the clouds of pre-historic
imagination; and--instead of a single inspired Homer for their author,
we were required to believe in some extraordinary spontaneous
generation, or in some collective genius of an age which ignorance had
personified.

But the person of a poet has been found more difficult of elimination
than a mere fact of history. Facts, it was once said, were stubborn
things; but in our days we have changed all that; a fact, under the
knife of a critic, splits in pieces, and is dissected out of belief with
incredible readiness. The helpless thing lies under his hand like a
foolish witness in a law court, when browbeaten by an unscrupulous
advocate, and is turned about and twisted this way and that way, till
in its distraction it contradicts itself, and bears witness against
itself; and to escape from torture, at last flies utterly away, its