west was the sixth, it followed that the highest was the first.
Thence, by a natural process common to most languages, those who
belonged to this highest had no number at all assigned to them. The
very absence of a number, the calling them _classici_, implied that
they belonged to _the_ class emphatically, or _par excellence_. _The
classics_ meant, therefore, the grandees in social consideration; and
thence by analogy in literature. But if this analogy be transferred
from Rome to Greece, where it had no corresponding root in civic
arrangement--then, by parity of reason, to all nations.]

Let us begin at the beginning--and that, as everybody knows, is Homer.
He is, indeed, so much at the beginning that, for that very reason (if
even there were no other), he is, and will be ever more, supremely
interesting. Is the unlearned reader aware of his age? Upon that point
there are more hypotheses than one or even two. Some there are among
the chronologers who make him eleven hundred years anterior to Christ.
But those who allow him least, place him more than nine--that is,
about two centuries before the establishment of the Grecian Olympiads,
and (which is pretty nearly the same thing as regards time) before
Romulus and Remus. Such an antiquity as this, even on its own account,
is a reasonable object of interest. A poet to whom the great-grandfather
of old Ancus Martius (his grandfather, did we say--that is, avus?--nay,
his _abavus_, his _atavus_, his _tritavus_) looked back as to one in a
line with his remote ancestor--a poet who, if he travelled about as
extensively as some have supposed him to do, or even as his own
countryman Herodotus most certainly did five or six hundred years
afterwards, might have conversed with the very workmen who laid the
foundations of the first temple at Jerusalem--might have bent the knee
before Solomon in all his glory:--Such a poet, were he no better than
the worst of our own old metrical romancers, would--merely for his
antiquity, merely for the sublime fact of having been coeval with the
eldest of those whom the eldest of histories presents to our knowledge;
coeval with the earliest kings of Judah, older than the greatest of the
Judean prophets, older than the separation of the two Jewish crowns and
the revolt of Israel, and, even with regard to Moses and to Joshua, not
in any larger sense junior than as we ourselves are junior to
Chaucer--purely and exclusively with regard to these pretensions