taken literally, cannot be doubted; nevertheless it is equally certain that the main points of the Greek mythology may be most happily explained in a figurative sense, and it is by no means clear that such an allegorical understanding of them is not the original and fundamental one.* Perhaps the importance of this branch of good scholarship has not been sufficiently considered in our great schools in modern times; at least it seems clear from the old editions of the classic poets that it was formerly much more an object of learned study than at present. It is from the Homeric Poems in general that we may best learn the character and bearings of the Popular Religion of the Greeks-that which the old heroic Poets made familiar to the most humble, and with which the almost exclusive devotion, and the splendid achievements of the Arts, associated feelings of fondness and of admiration in the hearts of the noblest, of their countrymen. The Sailor in the Piræus invoked the God; the Philosopher in the * "I rather think that the Fable was first, and the Exposition devised, than that the Moral was first, and thereupon the Fable framed; but yet that all the Fables and Fictions of the poets were but pleasure, and not figure, I interpose no opinion. Surely of those poets which are now extant, even Homer himself, notwithstanding he was made a kind of scripture by the latter schools of the Grecians, yet I should without any difficulty pronounce, that his fables had no such inwardness in his own meaning; but what they might have upon a more original tradition, is not easy to affirm, for he was not the inventor of many of them." Bacon, Adv. of Learning, B.II. Academy meditated on the Power or Law or Attribute; but both stopped to gaze at, and, gazing, almost equally admired, the Shape in which Phidias or Apelles represented the Sailor's God and the Wise Man's Allegory. But, independently of this not unimportant consideration, there is, as I have said before, so much beautiful and vigorous poetry in these Hymns that no boy, who aspires to be a Scholar, should leave school without having read them through frequently and with attention. a INTRODUCTION ΤΟ THE EPIGRAMS. UNDER the title of Epigrams are classed a few verses on different subjects, chiefly Addresses to cities or private individuals. There is one short Hymn to Neptune, which seems out of its place here. In the fourth Epigram, Homer is represented as speaking of his blindness and his itinerant life. κῆρα δ ̓ ἐγώ, τήν μοι θεὸς ἔπασε γεινομένῳ περ, The fate, which God allotted at my birth, As, my great Mind still leading me before, VOLL-21 The Poet addresses also the following thoughtful couplet to Thestorides :— Θεστορίδη, θνητοῖσιν ἀνωΐστων πολέων περι I reserve some remarks on the very peculiar character of the Greek Epigram till hereafter: it is sufficient at present to say that it is so far from being the same with, or even like to, the Epigram of modern times, that sometimes it is completely the reverse. In general the Songs in Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Waller, and, where he writes with simplicity, in Moore, give a better notion of the Greek Epigrams than any other species of modern composition. * Epig. VI. INTRODUCTION ΤΟ THE FRAGMENTS. TEH Fragments, as they are called, consist of a few scattered lines which are said to have been formerly found in the Iliad, the Odyssey and the other supposed works of Homer, and to have been omitted as spurious or dropped by chance from their ostensible context. Besides these, there are some passages from the Ilias Parva, or Little Iliad, and a string of verses taken from Homer's answers in the old work, called the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, which I have mentioned before. A passage from the Little Iliad, to which I have previously alluded, is worth notice, as containing an account of the fortunes of Eneas utterly at variance both with the Iliad, the Hymn to Venus and the Eneid, and also as showing the tone and style of these works, which were so popular in former ages, but which have now almost entirely perished. The subject of |