Sir Joshua Reynolds standing for the first time before the Raphaels and the Angelos of the great picture galleries, and going away humbled and mortified to find that he did not like them-a parable that needed no Nathan to enforce its application. Of what value, pray, were the presumption in favor of what exists and the consent of the ages, if every new man was at liberty to question the decrees of his betters? The conclusion was surely false, or the field within which the observation had been made, too narrow. The facts had a voice, perhaps, but the voice was not the highpriest's. It remained but to "go and lie down." And such, doubtless, would have been the end of the whole matter, had not the conviction that Homer was out of place been deepened by further experience, and shared in by a friend whose opinions upon all subjects connected with education are singularly broad and clear. Then it was determined to prepare this paper. The writer does not wish to deprecate criticism, but has felt it necessary to tell this long story, in order that he may be fully understood as stating the results of careful observation and the views to which this observation has driven him, rather than as arguing for the establishment of an abstract proposition that seems to be true a priori. He must hurry on, therefore to present iv tā orópati tov Zózov (cf. Xen. Ages. xi. 15), some reasons why a change in the course in Greek seems desirable; then to consider some substitutes for the Homer; and, last, to suggest a place where Homer might be read with profit. In order to catch precisely the point at issue in the question, When shall boys read Homer? let us suppose, for the sake of the argument, that the modern world knew neither the Iliad nor the Odyssea, and then try to put ourselves in the place of a learned professor, who, while rummaging among old manuscripts, should chance upon a copy of these poems. He feasts his own soul upon the wonderful story of the μήνιν Πηληϊάδεω Αχιλήος-embarrassed, no doubt, through a book or two by the peculiar dialects—and now prepares it a place in his course. Where shall it go? In one sense it is "easy Greek," but, as requiring a gigantic effort of memory to retain its archaic words and exceptional forms, it is very difficult. A charming story, it charms the imagination, not the realistic faculties. Its language, indeed, is exquisite, and its simplicity unapproachable, while at the same time it is a "great" epic, drawing upon the supernatural and attaining the sublime; but it stands apart from the main body of Greek literature, except so far as the latter is pervaded by certain old-time traditions, which the professor is now amazed to find crystallized in perfect beauty in the Homeric stories. For in them is unfolded a grand panorama of an age about which he has known but little or nothing. Beyond a few scattered notices in Herodotus, Thucydides, and some other later writers, Greek literature has only suggested the mysteries of that past which even we, with Homer in our hands, still call the age of myths and fables. The dramatists, the historians, the orators, all have seemed to know an era long anterior to the earliest of which they write distinctly; but a heavy veil has hung between them and this era, concealing it in deep obscurity, Now the veil is torn away. The age of the heroes and the demi-gods, ἡμιθέων γένος ἀνδρῶν, the days when Olympus was really inhabited by deities who walked with men, and, like the sun, overlooked and overheard all things, (II. iii. 227)—this age is now no longer to be guessed at: in Homer the mind may revel in its wonders, its tales of the noble deeds of noble men, its impossibilities. Every one knows, of course, that Homer and Hesiod are widely separated from even their nearest successors, but it is not every one who always remembers how very wide this separation really is. Chronology has never told us satisfactorily when Homer lived, or whether Hesiod was or was not his contemporary. Criticism doubts even yet whether Homer sings of an age in which he himself lived, or of one anterior to his own. Hesiod may write of a time later by a century than Homer's, or, as Mr. Mahaffy thinks, (Social Life in Greece, Cap. ii. and iii.,) only of " the other side" of social life in the same day. The world of the lyric poet was as different from that of which Homer writes, as it was from the still later Attic age-and this, although we suppose that Homer wrote of the times in which he lived. If he did not, then the gulf was yet wider between the Homeric period and the earliest lyric poets. It would seem impossible, therefore, to overestimate the impression which Homer would make upon the professor supposed, and but fair, perhaps, to conclude that his decision of the question at what point in his course he would read the Epics, would be biased completely by this impression. And if this be so, can any one doubt what that decision would be? Would he, in all probability, entrust his new-found treasures to the tender mercies of boys at school? On the contrary, would not every consideration incline him to reserve them for a later period? If any one doubts this inference, I beg him to read Mr. Mahaffy's book named above, and compare the chapters cited with his own recollections of the dreary toil he gave to dictionary and grammar, while he read wearily enough a book or two of the Iliad or the Odyssey. And yet it is, doubtless, just this place which Homer holds in relation to the later Greek literature that has set the learned world to reading him so early in the course. Upon these later writers he casts a perfect flood of light; without him, a dictionary of antiqui ties, much more a dictionary of biography and mythology, would have been almost impossible. The stories of an age of myth and fable are exactly of the sort that poets love. Homer's people are the Arthurs and the Launcelots, the Enids and the Guineveres of the Greek world; and the later Greek poets turned as naturally to the Homeric storehouse as Tennyson to the Legends of the Round Table. Boys must read Homer, therefore, as an introduction to Greek literature. Dialects, uncouth forms, the absence of an interest which boys can feel-none of these things must weigh in the balance: Homer must be read, though the heavens fall.2 And all this might be true, if our boys could read the whole of Homer, if they could learn a considerable portion of it by heart— are not the Homeric poems rhapsodies?—or even if they could acquire in what they do read an important fraction of the myths and fables. But what do the first three books contain of Homer-and half of one of them omitted, because it is a dreary catalogue of proper names, worse than those of the Book of Chronicles? Or what boy ever learned his Greek Mythology out of Homer? or knew the plot of the Hecuba or the Electra, because he had read a fraction of the Iliad or the Odyssea? His Lemprière, his Smith, or some such book of reference, has always been his encyclopædia of classic lore, and ever must remain such. Besides, if it be true that Homer must be read before the later writers, does it not follow by analogy, that English boys and girls should read the Book of the Saint Greal or Le Mort d' Arttur, before they think of Tenny 2 Perhaps another reason may have had some influence in giving Homer its present place. Fifty years ago, many post-classical writers were read in American colleges; copies of Greek books were scarce and dear; and many a professor, even, had hardly the faintest idea of the treasures of thought and imagination stored up in the literature which is now so easy of access through numerous and cheap publications. son? that later German poetry is a riddle till the Niebelungenlied has been mastered? Was ever cart so awkwardly before the horse? Allusion has already been made to the Homeric dialect as both difficult and barbarous to a boy trained in Attic Greek only. The degree of this difficulty is often underrated, even by the boy himself. For, after a book or so, familiarity breeds contempt of dictionary and grammar, and memory takes the reins from intellect. The process becomes mechanical. The pupil translates and reviews his lessons, and recites on the following day with a facility that is due largely to his powers of observation and localization. He recalls the meanings of many words, only because he knows where they stand in their sentences. Change copies with him, if yours is a different edition, and see what becomes of his readiness. Many and many a time has a candidate for admission excused himself with "I could have read it more freely in my own book." Tell your pupil to take compound words to pieces and trace derivatives to their sources: he will laugh you to scorn, for the simple words are as foreign to him as their compounds, and the root-words as their derivatives. And so with the peculiar syntax. The several ways of rendering the article, for example, are at first a stumbling block. Next they encourage guessing, which succeeds or fails, as guessing always does. At last all articles are demonstratives; and the pupil, brought to bay, defies attempts to teach him to discriminate. Nay, he carries this " rule of thumb" far into his subsequent reading, and renders ò this man in Xenophon or in Sophocles. Suppose for a moment that his earlier course had not included Homer. Would not a word in loco make perfectly clear and easy the occasional Homeric article in the later writers? Beyond the familiar formula, ¿ μév—¿ dé, (which, by the by, the pupil learns long before he hears of Homer,) and a very few similar -'s school, Since writing the above, two friends have told me that at Dr. their class held races in reading the first book of the Iliad, which some of them could reproduce in very respectable English in eleven minutes. One of the gentlemen, however, did not think he could have read it so rapidly from any copy but his own while the other said he knew he could not, for he always had some little private marks in his copy, which kept him straight. The latter told us a story of a clergyman who could say the Apostles' Creed so fast, that he would often give another person a start to "Pontius Pilate," and beat him at the end-a story quite conclusive as to the amount of intelligence involved in reading a whole book of Homer in eleven minutes. cases, the Attic article is used consistently and upon a principle that is easy, because it is in the main our English idiom. Why confuse the beginner with Homer's usage, which is by no means regular, even on the assumption that the article is always a demonstrative pronoun? (Goodwin's Greek Grammar, § 140.) Ex ungue leonem. Even the imitations of the Homeric vocabulary in which the playwrights indulge, could be explained before the class had read Homer, as well as afterwards. Another "con" which we have fancied our professor would put into his balance, is the ideal character of the pieces. Are boys often imaginative? Will not a fight, a race, a contest for a prize, in which an Entellus sends a Dares from an only half-fought field, yet "genua ægra trahentem, Jactantemque utroque caput, crassumque cruorem, Ore ejectantem mixtosque in sanguine dentes," entertain them vastly more than the fairest painted scene of maternal love and filial respect, like that between Thetis and Achilles? It is boy-nature to sympathize with Agamemnon bullying poor Chryses, and "adding yet harsher words;" but it is not boy-like to feel the grace or the beauty, the simplicity or the sublimity, of the description of the priest going off in silence, far from the Greeks, to tell his god Apollo, just as the disciples of John the Baptist "went and told Jesus." Were the issue between the priest and the chieftain one that involved fair-play, no honest boy would take Agamemnon's side; but boys see only a captive girl, a slave by all the existing laws of war, asked for by her father in return for a ransom, and refused most flatly by a conqueror in battle. The latter's insolence seems almost right. What matters it that words and metre speak plainly of the brutal harshness of the victor, (vv. 2632,) and as plainly of the disappointment and broken-heartedness of Chryses (vv. 33-42)? Few boys would understand their teacher upon such a point, or remember overnight a lesson on "sic metapheesic." Or how many boys would feel the pathos of the following? [Il. xxii. 482 sqq. Lord Derby's translation in Mahaffy's Social Life, p. 29.] "Now thou beneath the depths of earth art gone, A widow in thy house, in deepest woe; Our child an infant still, thy child and mine, |