ful and affectionate that nothing more perfect can be found
either in real life or fiction, yet as a general rule she is drawn
as teasing, scolding, thwarting, contradicting, and hoodwinking the
sex that has the effrontery to deem itself her lord and master.
Whether or no this view may have arisen from any domestic
difficulties between Homer and his wife is a point which again I
find it impossible to determine.

We cannot refrain from contemplating such possibilities. If we are
to be at home with Homer there must be no sitting on the edge of
one's chair dazzled by the splendour of his reputation. He was
after all only a literary man, and those who occupy themselves with
letters must approach him as a very honoured member of their own
fraternity, but still as one who must have felt, thought, and acted
much as themselves. He struck oil, while we for the most part
succeed in boring only; still we are his literary brethren, and if
we would read his lines intelligently we must also read between
them. That one so shrewd, and yet a dreamer of such dreams as have
been vouchsafed to few indeed besides himself--that one so genially
sceptical, and so given to looking into the heart of a matter,
should have been in such perfect harmony with his surroundings as to
think himself in the best of all possible worlds--this is not
believable. The world is always more or less out of joint to the
poet--generally more so; and unfortunately he always thinks it more
or less his business to set it right--generally more so. We are all
of us more or less poets--generally, indeed, less so; still we feel
and think, and to think at all is to be out of harmony with much
that we think about. We may be sure, then, that Homer had his full
share of troubles, and also that traces of these abound up and down
his work if we could only identify them, for everything that
everyone does is in some measure a portrait of himself; but here
comes the difficulty--not to read between the lines, not to try and
detect the hidden features of the writer--this is to be a dull,
unsympathetic, incurious reader; and on the other hand to try and
read between them is to be in danger of running after every Will o'
the Wisp that conceit may raise for our delusion.

I believe it will help you better to understand the broad humour of
the Iliad, which we shall presently reach, if you will allow me to
say a little more about the general characteristics of the poem.
Over an