rooted becomes the conviction that the Father of Poetry gave us this rich

inheritance, whole and entire. Whatever were the means of its preservation, let

us rather be thankful for the treasury of taste and eloquence thus laid open to

our use, than seek to make it a mere centre around which to drive a series of

theories, whose wildness is only equalled by their inconsistency with each

other.


As the hymns, and some other poems usually ascribed to Homer, are not included

in Pope’s translation, I will content myself with a brief account of the

Battle of the Frogs and Mice, from the pen of a writer who has done it full

justice:—


“This poem,” says Coleridge, “is a short mock-heroic of

ancient date. The text varies in different editions, and is obviously disturbed

and corrupt to a great degree; it is commonly said to have been a juvenile

essay of Homer’s genius; others have attributed it to the same Pigrees

mentioned above, and whose reputation for humour seems to have invited the

appropriation of any piece of ancient wit, the author of which was uncertain;

so little did the Greeks, before the age of the Ptolemies, know or care about

that department of criticism employed in determining the genuineness of ancient

writings. As to this little poem being a youthful prolusion of Homer, it seems

sufficient to say that from the beginning to the end, it is a plain and

palpable parody, not only of the general spirit, but of numerous passages of

the Iliad itself; and, even if no such intention to parody were discernible in

it, the objection would still remain, that to suppose a work of mere burlesque

to be the primary effort of poetry in a simple age, seems to reverse that order

in the development of national taste, which the history of every other people

in Europe, and of many in Asia, has almost ascertained to be a law of the human

mind; it is in a state of society much more refined and permanent than that