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The writer compiling the opinions of many men, and chiefly of the ancients, set forth, I know not how quaintly, that the Iliad was all in all to the human race—that it was history, poetry, revelation; that the works of men’s hands were folly and vanity, and would pass away like the dreams of a child, but that the kingdom of Homer would endure for ever and ever. I assented with all my soul.
As to the passages in which he discovers "borrowing or close imitation of passages" in the Iliad by the poet of the Odyssey, we shall not dwell on the matter, because we know so little about the laws regulating the repetition of epic formulae. It is tempting, indeed, to criticise Mr. Monro's list of twenty-four Odyssean "borrowings," and we might arrive at some curious results.
Who will believe that so perfect a poem as Homer's "Iliad" was not the product of the genius of a great poet, but that the letters of the alphabet, being confusedly jumbled and mixed, were by chance, as it were by the cast of a pair of dice, brought together in such an order as is necessary to describe, in verses full of harmony and variety, so many great events; to place and connect them so well together; to paint every object with all its most graceful, most noble, and most affecting attendants; in short, to make every person speak according to his character in so natural and so forcible a manner?
He passed over peers and statesmen to inscribe his "Iliad" to Congreve, with a magnanimity of which the praise had been complete, had his friend's virtue been equal to his wit. Why he was chosen for so great an honour, it is not now possible to know; there is no trace in literary history of any particular intimacy between them.
This general care must be universally approved; but it sometimes appeared in petty artifices of parsimony, such as the practice of writing his compositions on the back of letters, as may be seen in the remaining copy of the "Iliad," by which perhaps in five years five shillings were saved; or in a niggardly reception of his friends, and scantiness of entertainment, as, when he had two guests in his house, he would set at supper a single pint upon the table; and having himself taken two small glasses, would retire, and say, "Gentlemen.
It traverses the most affecting regions of the world, and describes no one of them: the Troad and we get only his childish raptures over Pope's "Homer's Iliad"; Stamboul and he recounts the murderous services rendered by the Golden Horn to the Assassin whose serail, palace, council chamber, it washes; Cairo but the Plague shuts out all other thoughts; Jerusalem but Pilgrims have vulgarized the Holy Sepulchre into a Bartholomew Fair.
As, in the serious style, Homer is pre-eminent among poets, for he alone combined dramatic form with excellence of imitation, so he too first laid down the main lines of Comedy, by dramatising the ludicrous instead of writing personal satire. His Margites bears the same relation to Comedy that the Iliad and Odyssey do to Tragedy.
We still think profess to think the barbarism of the 'Iliad' the highest flight of epic poetry; if Homer had sung this great battle, how glorious we should have thought it! Beyond a doubt, man 'yet partially retains the characteristics that adapted him to an antecedent state. THROUGH the Cayley family, I became very intimate with their near relatives the Worsleys of Hovingham, near York.
That one element is earlier than the other we cannot say with much certainty. The ritual aspect, as concerned with the happy future of the soul, does not appear in Iliad or Odyssey, where the Mysteries are not named.
Besides the "Hymns" of Homer and the "Iliad", he read the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the "Symposium" of Plato, and Arrian's "Historia Indica". In Latin, Apuleius alone is named. In English, the Bible was his constant study; he read a great portion of it aloud in the evening.
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