The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Humour of Homer and Other Essays, by
Samuel Butler, Edited by R. A. Streatfeild

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Title: The Humour of Homer and Other Essays

Author: Samuel Butler

Release Date: June 18, 2004 [eBook #12651]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HUMOUR OF HOMER AND OTHER
ESSAYS***

Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

The Humour of Homer and Other Essays

Introduction
By R. A. Streatfeild

The nucleus of this book is the collection of essays by Samuel
Butler, which was originally published by Mr. Grant Richards in 1904
under the title Essays on Life, Art and Science, and reissued by Mr.
Fifield in 1908. To these are now added another essay, entitled
"The Humour of Homer," a biographical sketch of the author kindly
contributed by Mr. Henry Festing Jones, which will add materially to
the value of the edition, and a portrait in photogravure from a
photograph taken in 1889--the period of the essays.

[Photograph of Samuel Butler. Caption reads: From a photograph
made by Pizzetta in Varallo in 1889. Emery Walker Ltd., ph. sc.
butler.jpg]

"The Humour of Homer" was originally delivered as a lecture at the
Working Men's College in Great Ormond Street on the 30th January,
1892, the day on which Butler first promulgated his theory of the
Trapanese origin of the Odyssey in a letter to the Athenaeum. Later
in the same year it was published with some additional matter by
Messrs. Metcalfe and Co. of Cambridge. For the next five years
Butler was engaged upon researches into the origin and authorship of
the Odyssey, the results of which are embodied in his book The
Authoress of the "Odyssey," originally published by Messrs. Longman
in 1897. Butler incorporated a good deal of "The Humour of Homer"
into The Authoress of the "Odyssey," but the section relating to the
Iliad naturally found no place in the later work. For the sake of
this alone "The Humour of Homer" deserves to be better known.
Written as it was for an artisan audience and professing to deal
only with one side of Homer's genius, "The Humour of Homer" must
not, of course,