HOMER, the general patriarch of Occidental literature, reminds us oftentimes, and powerfully, of the river Nile. If you, reader, should (as easily you may) be seated on the banks of that river in the months of February or March 1842, you may count on .two luxuries for a poetic eye-first, on a lovely cloudless morning; secondly, on a gorgeous flora. For it has been remarked, that nowhere, out of tropical regions, is the vernal equipage of nature so rich, so pompously variegated, in buds, and bells, and blossoms, as precisely in this unhappy Egypt-"a house of bondage" undeniably, in all ages, to its own working population; and yet, as if to mock the misery it witnesses, the gayest of all lands in its spontaneous flora. Now, supposing yourself to be seated, together with a child or two, on some flowery carpet of the Delta; and supposing the Nile-" that ancient river"

within sight; happy infancy on the one side, the everlasting pomp of waters on the other; and the thought still intruding, that on some quarter of your position, perhaps fifty miles out of sight, stand pointing to the heavens the mysterious pyramids. These circumstances presupposed, it is inevitable that your thoughts should wander upwards to the dark fountains of origination. The pyramids, why and when did they arise? This infancy, so lovely and innocent, whence does it come, whither does it go? This creative river, what are its ultimate well-heads? That last question was

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viewed by antiquity as charmed against solution. It was not permitted, they fancied, to dishonour the river Nile by stealing upon his solitude in a state of weakness and childhood"Nec licuit populis parvum te, Nile, videre."

So said Lucan. And in those days no image that the earth suggested could so powerfully express a mysterious secresy, as the coy fountains of the Nile. At length came Abyssinian Bruce; and that superstition seemed to vanish. Yet now again the mystery has revolved upon us. You have drunk, you say, from the fountains of the Nile? Good; but, my friend, from which fountains?" Which king, Bezonian?" Understand that there is another branch of the Nile-another mighty arm, whose fountains lie in far other regions. The great letter Y, that Pythagorean marvel, is still covered with shades in one half of its bifurcation. And the darkness which, from the eldest of days, has invested Father Nile with fabulous awe, still broods over his most ancient fountains, defies our curious impertinence, and will not suffer us to behold the survivor of Memphis, and of Thebesthe hundred-gated-other than in his grandeur as a benefactor of nations.

Such thoughts, a world of meditations pointing in the same direction, settle also upon Homer. Eight-andtwenty hundred years, according to the improved views of chronology, have men drunk from the waters of

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this earliest amongst poets. Himself, under one of his denominations, the son of a river [Melesigenes], or the grandson of a river [Mæonides], he has been the parent of fertilizing streams carried off derivatively into every land. Not the fountains of the Nile have been so diffusive, or so creative, as those of Homer

"a quo, ceu fonte perenni, Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis."

There is the same gayety of atmosphere, the same "blue rejoicing sky," the same absence of the austere and the gloomy sublime, investing the Grecian Homer as invests the Nile of the Delta. And again, if you would go upwards to the fountains of this ancient Nile, or of this ancient Homer, you would find the same mysterious repulsion. In both cases you find their fountains shyly retreating before you; and like the sacred peaks of Ararat, where the framework of Noah's ark reposes, never less surmounted than when a man fancies himself within arm's reach of their central recesses.*

A great poet appearing in early ages, and a great river, bear something of the same relation to human civility and culture. In this view, with a peculiar sublimity, the Hindoos consider a mighty fertilizing river, when bursting away with torrent rapture from its mountain cradle, and billowing onwards through two thousand miles of realms made rich by itself, as in some special meaning "the Son of God." The word Burrampooter is said to bear that sublime sense. Hence arose the profound interest about the Nile: what cause could produce its annual swelling? Even as a phenomenon that was awful, but much more so as a creative agency; for it was felt that Egypt, which is but the valley of the Nile, had been the mere creation of the river annually depositing its rich layers of slime. Hence arose the corresponding interest about Homer ; for Greece and the Grecian Isles were in many moral respects as

much the creation of Homer as Egypt of the Nile. And if, on the one hand, it is unavoidable to assume some degree of civilization before a Homer could exist, on the other, it is certain that Homer, by the picture of unity which he held aloft to the Greeks, in making them co-operate to a common enterprise against Asia, and by the intellectual pleasure which he first engrafted upon the innumerable festivals of Hellas, did more than lawgivers to propagate this early civilization, and to protect it against those barbarizing feuds or migrations which through some centuries menaced its exist

ence.

Having, therefore, the same motive of curiosity-having the same awe, connected first, with secresy; secondly, with remoteness; and thirdly, with beneficent power, which turn our enquiries to the infant Nile, let us pursue a parallel investigation with regard to the infant Homer. How was Homer possible? how could such a poet as Homer-how could such a poem as the Iliadarise in days so illiterate? Or rather, and first of all, was Homer possible? If the Iliad could and did arise, not as a long series of separate phenomena, but as one solitary birth of revolutionary power, how was it preserved? how passed onwards from generation to generation? how propagated over Greece during centuries, when our modern facilities for copying on paper, and the general art of reading, were too probably unknown?

We presume every man of letters to be aware, that, since the time of the great German philologer, Fred. Augustus Wolf, [for whose life and services to literature, see Wilhelm Koerte's "Leben und Studien Friedr. Aug. Wolfs." 1833,] a great shock has been given to the slumbering credulity of men on these Homeric subjects; a galvanic resuscitation to the ancient scepticism on the mere possibility of an Iliad, such as we now have it, issuing sound and complete,

in the 10th or 11th century before Christ, from the brain of a blind man, who had not (they say) so much as chalk towards the scoring down of his thoughts. The doubts moved by Wolf in 1795, propagated a controversy in Germany which has subsisted down to the present time This controversy concerns Homer himself, and his first-born child the Iliad; for as to the Odyssey, sometimes reputed the child of his old age, and as to the minor poems, which never could have been ascribed to him by philosophic critics, these are universally given up-as having no more connexion with Homer personally, than any other of the many epic and cyclical poems which arose during Post-Homeric ages, in a spirit of imitation, more or less diverging from the primitive Homeric model.

Fred. Wolf raised the question soon after the time of the French Revolution. Afterwards he pursued it [1797] in his letters to Heyne. But it is remarkable that a man so powerful in scholarship, witnessing the universal fermentation he had caused, should not have responded to the general call upon himself to come forward and close the dispute with a comprehensive valuation of all that had been said, and all that yet remained to be said, upon this difficult problem. Voss, the celebrated translator of Homer into German dactylic hexameters, was naturally interested by a kind of personal stake in the controversy. He wrote to Wolf-warmly, perhaps, and in a tone almost of moral remonstrance; but without losing his temper, or forgetting the urbanity of a scholar. "I believe," said he, in his later correspondence of the year 1796, “ I believe in one Iliad, in one Odyssey, and in one Homer as the sole father of both. Grant that Homer could not write his own name—and so much I will concede that your acute arguments have almost demonstrated-still to my thinking that only enhances the glory of the poet. The unity of this poet, and the unity of his works, are as yet to me unshaken ideas. But what then? I am no bigot in my creed, so as to close my ears against all hostile arguments. And these arguments, let me say plainly, you now owe to us all: arguments drawn from the internal structure of the Homeric poems. You have wounded us, Mr Wolf, in our affections: you

have affronted us, Mr Wolf, in our tenderest sensibilities. But still we are just men; ready to listen, willing to bear and to forbear. Meantime the matter cannot rest here. You owe it, Mr Wolf, to the dignity of the subject, not to keep back those proofs which doubtless you possess ; proofs, observe, conclusive proofs. For hitherto, per mit me to say, you have merely played with the surface of the question. True, even that play has led to some important results; and for these no man is more grateful than myself. But the main battle is still in arrear."

Wolf, however, hearkened not to such appeals. He had called up spirits, by his evocation, more formidable than he looked for or could lay. Perhaps, like the goddess Eris at thewedding feast, he had merely sought to amuse himself by throwing a ball of contention amongst the literati :-a little mischief was all he contemplated, and a little learned Billingsgate. Things had taken a wider circuit. Wolf's acuteness in raising objections to all the received opinions had fallen upon a kindly soil: the public mind had reacted powerfully; for the German mind is but too naturally disposed to scepticism; and Wolf found himself at length in this dilemma-viz. that either, by writing a very inadequate sequel, he must forfeit the reputation he had acquired; or that he must prepare himself for a compass of research to which his spirits were nor equal, and to which his studies had not latterly been directed. A man of high celebrity may be willing to come forward in undress, and to throw out such casual thoughts as the occasion may prompt, provided he can preserve his incognito; but if he sees a vast public waiting to receive him with theatric honours, and a flourish of trumpets announcing his approach, reasonably he may shrink from facing expectations so highly raised, and may perhaps truly plead an absolute impossibility of pursuing further any question under such original sterility of materials, and after so elaborate a cultivation by other labourers.

Wolf, therefore, is not to be blamed for having declined, in its mature stages, to patronise his own question. His own we call it, because he first pressed its strongest points; because he first kindled it into a public feud; and because, by his matchless revisal of the Homeric text, he gave to the world,

simultaneously with his doubts, the very strongest credentials of his own right to utter doubts. And the public, du ring the forty-six years' interval which has succeeded to his first opening of the case, have viewed the question as so exclusively his-that it is generally known under the name of the Wolfian hypothesis. All this is fair and natural: that rebel who heads the mob of insurgents is rightly viewed as the father of the insurrection. Yet still, in the rigour of justice, we must not overlook the earlier conspirators. Not to speak here of more ancient sceptics, it is certain that in modern times Bentley, something more than 150 years back, with his usual divinity of eye, saw the opening for doubts. Already in the year 1689, when he was a young man fresh from college, Bentley gave utterance to several of the Wolfian scruples. And, indeed, had he done nothing more than call attention to the digamma, as applied to the text of Homer, he could not have escaped feeling and communicating these scruples. To a man who was one day speaking of some supposed hiatus in the Iliad, Bentley, from whom courtesy flowed as naturally as "milk from a male tiger," called out-" Hiatus, man! Hiatus in your throat! There is no such thing in Homer." And, when the other had timidly submitted to him such cases as μετα ειπων, Οι καλα spła, or μshindea ovov, Bentley showed him that, unless where the final syllable of the prior word happened to be in arsi, (as suppose in пnanada Axianos,) universally the hiatus had not existed to the ears of Homer. And why? Because it was cured by the interposition of the digamma: "apud Homerum sæpe videtur hiatus esse, ubi prisca littera digamma explebat intermedium spatium." Thus μsanda ovov in Homer's age was ushindi Fovov, (from which Eolic form is derived our modern word for wine in all the western and central languages of Christendom: F is V, and V is W all the world overwhence vin, wine, vino, wein, wün, and so on; all originally depending upon that Æolic letter F, which is so necessary to the metrical integrity of Homer.)

Now, when once a man of Bentley's sagacity had made that step-forcing him to perceive that here had been people of old time tampering with Homer's text, (else how had the digamma dropped out of the place which once it must have occupied,) he could not but go a little further. If you see one or two of the indorsements on a bill mis-spelt, you begin to suspect general forgery. When the text of Homer had once become frozen and settled, no man could take liberties with it at the risk of being tripped up himself on its glassy surface, and landed in a lugubrious sedentary posture, to the derision of all critics, compositors, pressmen, devils, and devillets. But whilst the text was yet piping hot, or lukewarm, or in the transitional state of cooling, every man who had a private purpose to serve might impress upon its plastic wax whatever alterations he pleased, whether by direct addition or by substitution, provided only he had skill to evade any ugly seam or cicatrice. It is true he could run this adulterated Homer only on that particular road to which he happened to have access. But then, in after generations, when all the Homers were called in by authority for general collation, his would go up with the rest; his forgery would be accepted for a various reading, and would thus have a fair chance of coming down to posterity-which word means, at this moment, you, reader, and ourselves. We are posterity. Yes, even we have been humbugged by this Pagan rascal; and have doubtless drunk off much of his swipes under the firm faith that we were drinking the pure fragrant wine (the sλindra Foivor) of Homer.

Bentley having thus warned the public, by one general caveat, that tricks upon travellers might be looked for on this road, was succeeded by Wood, who, in his Essay on the Genius of Homer, occasionally threw_up rockets in the same direction. Essay first crept out in the year 1769, but only to the extent of seven copies; and it was not until the year 1775,* that a second edition diffused the new views freely amongst the world. The

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