the fair one herself among the heroes of her age; however Mr. Knight may have

failed in reducing the Homeric language to its primitive form; however,

finally, the Attic dialect may not have assumed all its more marked and

distinguishing characteristics:—still it is difficult to suppose that the

language, particularly in the joinings and transitions, and connecting parts,

should not more clearly betray the incongruity between the more ancient and

modern forms of expression. It is not quite in character with such a period to

imitate an antique style, in order to piece out an imperfect poem in the

character of the original, as Sir Walter Scott has done in his continuation of

Sir Tristram.


“If, however, not even such faint and indistinct traces of Athenian

compilation are discoverable in the language of the poems, the total absence of

Athenian national feeling is perhaps no less worthy of observation. In later,

and it may fairly be suspected in earlier times, the Athenians were more than

ordinarily jealous of the fame of their ancestors. But, amid all the traditions

of the glories of early Greece embodied in the Iliad, the Athenians play a most

subordinate and insignificant part. Even the few passages which relate to their

ancestors, Mr. Knight suspects to be interpolations. It is possible, indeed,

that in its leading outline, the Iliad may be true to historic fact; that in

the great maritime expedition of western Greece against the rival and

half-kindred empire of the Laomedontiadae, the chieftain of Thessaly, from his

valour and the number of his forces, may have been the most important ally of

the Peloponnesian sovereign: the pre-eminent value of the ancient poetry on the

Trojan war may thus have forced the national feeling of the Athenians to yield

to their taste. The songs which spoke of their own great ancestor were, no

doubt, of far inferior sublimity and popularity, or, at first sight, a Theseid