ally repeat, after a few minutes consideration any verse
required from any part of the Bible--even the obscurest and most
unimportant enumeration of mere proper names not excepted. We do not
mention these facts as touching the more difficult part of the
question before us, but facts they are; and if we find so much
difficulty in calculating the extent to which the mere memory may be
cultivated, are we, in these days of multifarious reading, and of
countless distracting affairs, fair judges of the perfection to
which the invention and the memory combined may attain in a simpler
age, and among a more single minded people?--Quarterly Review, _l.
c.,_ p. 143, sqq.
Heeren steers between the two opinions, observing that, "The
Dschungariade of the Calmucks is said to surpass the poems of Homer
in length, as much as it stands beneath them in merit, and yet it
exists only in the memory of a people which is not unacquainted with
writing. But the songs of a nation are probably the last things
which are committed to writing, for the very reason that they are
remembered."-- _Ancient Greece._ p. 100.
26 Vol. II p. 198, sqq.
27 Quarterly Review, _l. c.,_ p. 131 sq.
28 Betrachtungen uber die Ilias. Berol. 1841. See Grote, p. 204. Notes
and Queries, vol. v. p. 221.
29 Prolegg. pp. xxxii., xxxvi., &c.
30 Vol. ii. p. 214 sqq.
31 "Who," says Cicero, de Orat. iii. 34, "was more learned in that age,
or whose eloquence is reported to have been more perfected by
literature than that of Peisistratus, who is said first to have
disposed the books of Homer in the order in which we now have them?"
Compare Wolf's Prolegomena, Section 33
32 "The first book, together with the eighth, and the books from the
eleventh to the twenty-second inclusive, seems to form the primary
organization of the poem, then properly an Achilleis."--Grote, vol.
ii. p. 235
33 K. R. H. Mackenzie, Notes and Queries, p. 222 sqq.
34 See his Epistle to Raphelingius, in Schroeder's edition, 4to.,
Delphis, 1728.
35 Ancient Greece, p. 101.
36 The best description of this monument will be found in Vaux's
"Antiquities of the British Museum," p. 198 sq. The monument itself
(Towneley Sculptures, No. 123) is well known.
37 Coleridge, Classic Poets, p. 276.
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