course between highly cultivated men and women, and which he could
only have learnt by living in a society where men and women met and felt
in the way which he has described.

Who, then, was Homer? What was he? When did he live? History has
absolutely nothing to answer. His poems were not written; for the art of
writing (at any rate for a poet's purpose) was unknown to him. There is
a vague tradition that the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and a comic poem
called the Margites, were composed by an Ionian whose name was Homer,
about four hundred years before Herodotus, or in the ninth century B.C.
We know certainly that these poems were preserved by the Rhapsodists, or
popular reciters, who repeated them at private parties or festivals,
until writing came into use, and they were fixed in a less precarious
form. A later story was current, that we owe the collection to
Pisistratus; but an exclusive claim for him was probably only Athenian
conceit. It is incredible that men of genius in Homer's own
land--Alcaeus, for instance--should have left such a work to be done by a
foreigner. But this is really all which is known; and the creation of
the poems lies in impenetrable mystery. Nothing remains to guide us,
therefore, except internal evidence (strangely enough, it is the same
with Shakespeare), and it has led to wild conclusions: yet the wildest
is not without its use; it has commonly something to rest upon; and
internal evidence is only really valuable when outward testimony has
been sifted to the uttermost. The present opinion seems to be, that each
poem is unquestionably the work of one man; but whether both poems are
the work of the same is yet _sub judice_. The Greeks believed they were;
and that is much. There are remarkable points of resemblance in style,
yet not greater than the resemblances in the 'Two Noble Kinsmen' and in
the 'Yorkshire Tragedy' to 'Macbeth' and 'Hamlet;' and there are more
remarkable points of non-resemblance, which deepen upon us the more we
read. On the other hand, tradition is absolute. If the style of the
Odyssey is sometimes unlike the Iliad, so is one part of the Iliad
sometimes unlike another. It is hard to conceive a genius equal to the
creation of either Iliad or Odyssey to have existed without leaving at
least a legend of his name; and the difficulty of criticising style
accurately in an old language will be appreciated by those who have
tried their hand in their own language with the disputed