analyzing the complicated emotions which they had experienced as hearers in the

crowd, and who would, on perusing the written words, realize in their

imaginations a sensible portion of the impression communicated by the reciter.

Incredible as the statement may seem in an age like the present, there is in

all early societies, and there was in early Greece, a time when no such reading

class existed. If we could discover at what time such a class first began to be

formed, we should be able to make a guess at the time when the old epic poems

were first committed to writing. Now the period which may with the greatest

probability be fixed upon as having first witnessed the formation even of the

narrowest reading class in Greece, is the middle of the seventh century before

the Christian aera (B.C. 660 to B.C. 630), the age of Terpander, Kallinus,

Archilochus, Simenides of Amorgus, &c. I ground this supposition on the

change then operated in the character and tendencies of Grecian poetry and

music—the elegiac and the iambic measures having been introduced as

rivals to the primitive hexameter, and poetical compositions having been

transferred from the epical past to the affairs of present and real life. Such

a change was important at a time when poetry was the only known mode of

publication (to use a modern phrase not altogether suitable, yet the nearest

approaching to the sense). It argued a new way of looking at the old epical

treasures of the people, as well as a thirst for new poetical effect; and the

men who stood forward in it may well be considered as desirous to study, and

competent to criticize, from their own individual point of view, the written

words of the Homeric rhapsodies, just as we are told that Kallinus both noticed

and eulogized the Thebais as the production of Homer. There seems, therefore,

ground for conjecturing that (for the use of this newly-formed and important,