The chief cities of Greece had their copies prepared under the inspection and stamped with the authority of the state. The greatest poets of succeeding times were proud to confess that they drank from the inexhaustible fountain of Homer. The great festivals of Athens were graced by the public delivery, with suitable pomp of accompaniment, of those great epics. If we trace the outlines of Homer's intellectual culture, by following out the hints scattered through the Iliad and Odyssey, we must reject the legend that the poet was a blind beggar bard, and picture him to ourselves in a very different light. He was evidently placed in a condition of life which surrounded his childhood with the most favoring influences. He must have received from nature an exquisite physical organization; no object, great or small, within the range of vision, escaped the glance of his vigilant eye; his ear was attuned to a delicate perception of the melodies of nature and art; his sensitive nerves vibrated to every breath of heaven and every impulse of the soul; and his busy fancy was for ever moulding and recombining what he had seen, heard, and felt. We have the most striking proofs that he had visited every important city of Asia Minor, and all the gaan islands; that he had carefully inspected the plain of Troy, and the shores of the Hellespont; that he had crossed the sea to Africa, and ascended the Nile; that he was familiar with the coasts, rivers, mountains, and cities of Greece; that he had visited all the islands along the western shore as far north as Corcyra; that he had probably seen a part of Italy, and had passed the straits that separate it from Sicily. He was equally at home in the movements of war and the arts of peace. At sea, he knew every rope in the ship, and exhausted the nautical lore of the sailors. He probably listened to the stories of the navigators with whom he sailed over the Egan, and out of these materials at a later period wove the web of his own enchanting tales. We may imagine that during his wanderings, his thoughts "voluntary moved harmonious numbers," and that the inspiration of the muse stole upon him, under the walls of Thebes, in the shadow of the pyramids, on the bosom of the roaring sea, on the storm-lashed shore, under the blaze of day, in crowds of men, in the deep silence of the night, at the rising of the sun, at the setting of the Pleiades. We must suppose that his genius had long trained itself, instinctively if not consciously, for his great poetical task; that he had listened with delight to the songs of the bards, reciting the achievements of another age; that he had joined reverently in the processions, and heard the prayers of the priests as they invoked the blessings of his country's gods. We may believe that he had tried the powers of his native Ionian tongue, and sought the ample phrase and resounding line that should fittingly express his crowding and fiery thoughts, and that he felt while he listened to the minstrels of his age

that they had not touched the deepest chord. And when he comes forward himself to try his hand upon the phorminx, in the bloom of his early youth, the sweet modesty of his expression, and the inborn nobleness of his manner, excite interest and command attention. Of what shall he sing, but the wrath of Achillesthe ever youthful hero of the Trojan tale? The hearers become suddenly conscious that no common hand is upon the lyre, and a deep stillness pervades the assembly, broken only by the rich and powerful voice of the new aoidos, as he invokes the muse, Mŋviv acide, Sea. The story of the chieftains' quarrel is soon told; the rhapsody ends too soon; and after a moment of expectant silence, long and loud applauses from that spell-bound throng rend the skies. From this moment all who are present know that the great creative intellect, the wisest man of his age, has appeared among them. Soon there will be no doubt in Ionia, or in Greece, who is the great poet-the favorite of men and gods. Such we conceive to have been the commencement of Homer's poetical career, and the first step toward the conception of the plan of the Iliad. It seems most probable that Homer did not pass at once from the ballad composition, the only narrative before him; but that the story of Troy, and the poetical eminence of the wrath of Achilles among its incidents, gradually broke upon him; that the creation of the Iliad was the organic growth of studious years, passed in the practice of the minstrel's art; and that, after this long study, it reached its natural termination, received its completed form, and its unity of spirit. In the continuous practice of the poetic art, he had combined the epic elements of the heroic traditions, had breathed fresh life into the traditional characters, and had brought the several parts of the Ilian story into such intimate connection and harmony, that they no longer appeared as ballad minstrelsies, serving the poet's turn for brief rehearsals, but embodied in one magnificent panorama all the essential features of the great national adventure. The time occupied by the direct action of the Iliad embraces only between 40 and 50 days; but what preceded and followed in the national traditions is implied or incidentally introduced. The plan is highly ingenious, and could not have been accidental-that is, could not have arisen without the arrangement and conscious purpose of the artist; and it is a plan which possesses in a remarkable degree the essential requisite of unity in variety, springing from the ordaining action of high creative genius. The plan of the Odyssey is more complicated than that of the Iliad, and the materials present a richer variety. Homer had already conceived and executed the plan of a great epic that embraced the most striking parts of the Trojan war; and the legends of the returns of the heroes naturally offered themselves to him as the materials of a new poem of similar extent. Among these, the adventures of the wise Odysseus, and his long wanderings before he retrod the soil of his

native Ithaca, were probably favorite themes of the singers. His bravery, his ready counsel, his eloquence in debate, described in the Iliad as resembling the snow flakes falling in winter, his prompt device in meeting every emergency, made his character and fortunes a subject on which the imagination of the subtle Greek always delighted to dwell. The return of Odysseus therefore naturally attracted the attention of the poet, and formed the centre around which the second great epic action revolved. The poet had passed the fiery years of youth; he had exhausted the poetical resources of martial achievements, and now the calmer aspects of life rose before him with more attractive charm. The Odyssey reversed the picture of the Iliad. Hence, the quiet scenes of common life, the incidents of the voyage and the land journey, here stand in the foreground. Looking at the Odyssey as a work of art, we find in it more of premeditation, in its general scheme, than in the Iliad. The difference is recognizable in the very first line. The Iliad opens with a call upon the muse to "sing" the wrath of Achilles, and the Odyssey invites her to "tell" or "relate" the adventures of Odysseus; as if, when he began the composition of the Iliad, he had only a song in his mind, the great plan coming afterward; and when he began the Odyssey, he had preconceived the whole epic narrative. There are several distinct lines of adventure, * all leading to the same point, the proper adjustment and right management of which required not only careful previous reflection, but constant exercise of skilful arrangement and organization, that each, while clearly and carefully executed, should yet be kept in due subordination to the general design of the whole. In point of poetical merit-richness of invention, brilliancy of imagination, and fitness of 'expression -it cannot be said that the Odyssey is at all inferior to the Iliad. The subjects are different, and require to some extent a difference of handling; there is, therefore, an appearance of more vigor in the one, of calmer beauty in the other. But in the Iliad there are scenes of domestic life and affections breathing the greatest tenderness and beauty, and in the Odyssey passages of grandeur and sublimity unsurpassed in the Iliad; showing that in the warlike and fiery Iliad the poet had the same sense of the beautiful as in the Odyssey, and in the Odyssey the same wonderful vigor as in the Iliad. Though we may admit, with Longinus in his fine criticism, that the Iliad was the work of the poet's youth, and the Odyssey that of his declining age; that the former was the sun in his midday splendor, and the latter the sun in the beauty of his setting; still, in both it is the sun that shines, and the glory is not less in one than in the other.-Among the ancients, a question was started by some of the later Greek critics whether the Iliad and Odyssey were the work of the same author; but it was only a question; or rather the theory of a different origin was held only by a few; the overpower

ing weight of the best opinion was in favor of the unity of authorship. Aristotle held that the "Hymns," now generally published with the Iliad and Odyssey, were not his composition, and the best modern critics coincide in this judgment. But no doubt ever suggested itself to the masterly critic of the Lyceum, that the great epics were from the hand of Homer. In modern times a theory has been constructed of the origin and character of the Homeric poems, according to which they are not epics at all, but only disconnected compositions, by many ballad-makers, happening to be so composed, and on such subjects, that they were capable of being strung together, and that they have been gradually moulded into their present form; the theory asserts further, that alphabetic writing was either not known at all in Greece and Ionia in that age, or if known the materials were so scarce, cumbrous, and costly, that the art was unavailable for literary purposes; that there was no such man as Homer, but the name is simply an etymology. All these views have not been held by all who have rejected the unity of the Homeric compositions; but the above statement embraces summarily all the main points in the discussion of the Homeric question. The outlines of it were suggested by Vico in his Scienza nuova. Casaubon expressed doubts upon the subject. Bentley took substantially the view that Homer composed only short pieces, to be sung, one at a time, for the amusement of festive companies. Perrault and Hedelin, two French critics, also sketched the outlines of the theory that no one poet was the author of the Iliad or Odyssey, but that both poems were compilations of minstrelsies composed by many different persons of the same or nearly the same age. This particular view was adopted and maintained by Heyne, with great learning. The theory of F. A. Wolf starts from the same point as Bentley's, and is developed in his Prolegomena (1795) with masterly ability and eloquence. Wood, a learned Englishman, who had travelled in Greece and the East, and published in 1770 a little book on the "Original Genius of Homer," held the opinion that the poems were not originally reduced to writing. This view was entertained by Frederic Jacobs, as will be seen from the following picturesque passage in one of his discourses. Led away by the genius of Wolf, he says: "Writing conquers speaking, and strikes it dead. The lyre is silenced, and lives only as a figure of speech in written odes; song dies in the musical sign, and the written precept soars proud and cold away over the surrounding scene, to a remote and wide-extended world, and often beyond the present, directly to coming generations: Almost 5 centuries had gone before the poems of Homer were imprisoned in written characters; and even then, mindful of their original destination, they flowed more sweetly from the tongue to the ear." Wolf's theory was, for a time, generally adopted, and his ingenious arguments were accepted as de

monstration. Since his day the question has undergone many searching scrutinies; among his own countrymen, Nitsch has answered Wolf very ably; but by far the most thorough, learned, and conclusive demonstration of the entire fallacy of the theory, in every form it has assumed, is that of Col. Mure, in his still unfinished "History of Greek Literature." A few remarks on several of the leading topics are all that are necessary to complete our own view. 1. No person, reading these two poems without prejudice, and exercising merely common sense, would ever suspect a want of unity, complete ness, or coherence, except in some very unimportant particulars. 2. Slight contradictions, inequalities, and incoherences, at least to an equal extent, may be found in the best authors, as in Virgil, Cervantes, Milton, Scott, and many others; and the argument drawn from such premises, in the case of the Homeric poems, proves nothing or too much. The critical dogma, as laid down by Hermann, "that no two passages in the same work, contradictory to or irreconcilable with each other, can be by one and the same author," in its unqualified form, has no foundation in human nature, and is not supported by literary experience. 3. The argument drawn from the supposed want of writing materials, and possibly the ignorance of the art of writing in the age of Homer, is founded on a mere assumption, with no facts and no opinions of the ancients to support it. On the other hand, the employment of writing by Homer is silently taken for granted by those who lived nearest his age, the poets of the 7th and 8th centuries B. C., who certainly employed writing themselves, and who never allude to it as a newly discovered art. We cannot argue, from the present non-existence of written documents of the age of Homer, that they never existed. Moreover, there are absolute proofs that the art of writing, and abundant and convenient materials for writing, such as reed pens, papyrus, and ink, were in common use in Egypt more than 1,500 years before the birth of Homer. It is supposed that the Phoenicians formed their alphabet by selecting some of the phonetic elements from the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and that, long before Homer, they had carried with them the art in their voyages round the Mediterranean. The Greeks of Ionia were in frequent intercourse with both Egyptians and Phoenicians, and it is incredible that so intellectual a race should have neglected to avail themselves of an art so convenient for every purpose of business or literature, which had long been possessed by nations intellectually inferior to themselves. We must say that all the facts and probabilities that have any bearing upon the question, are against the theory of Wolf. A more recent German critic, Lachmann, carries the separating process so far as to distribute the Iliad among about 18 poets. Mr. Grote, in his "History of Greece," argues that originally there was an Achilleid, i. e., an epic on the exploits of Achilles, and that the other portions of

the Iliad were not included in the original plan. In the first place, it is improbable that several poets, of the highest order of genius, should have appeared in Ionia in the same age, though perhaps not impossible; but the improbability that 18, or more, such poets should have appeared, amounts to a moral impossibility; and no one has questioned the general excellence of the whole mass of poetry constituting the Iliad and Odyssey. The internal evidence, not from mere style, for experience shows how deceptive that is, but from the unity of spirit and characters that prevails through both poems, is of the greatest weight; first, in the broadest sense of the term, when we look at the poems as a whole; and second, if we examine the details, especially the characters of the heroes who carry forward the action in the Iliad and Odyssey. The first species of unity of spirit is less conclusive than the second; for there is in every age a pervading tone that marks its literary productions. But no such explanation can make it probable that complete identity. would be maintained in the characters, through a large number of literary works, by different authors. We must believe, it is true, that the subject of the Trojan war had already been handled, in the age immediately following that event, and in the hexameter verse. We may suppose, too, that the names and exploits of many of the heroes had already been made familiar in the ballad literature of Greece; like the legendary Cid in the ballads of Spain, like Arthur and the knights of the round table, like Charlemagne and his peers, and like Hagen, Guntler, and Siegfried in the mediaval poetry of Germany. But the ballad, even the Nibelungenlied, is only a rudimentary epic, and does not allow of the development of character with minute and careful study of the nicer shades. To work them out with finished detail belongs to trained poetic art, guided by principles which have been ascertained by study and experience. And this is the way in which Homer used the materials furnished by his predecessors; it is the way in which Shakespeare used traditions and characters, the outlines of which had been drawn by the feebler hands of the poets who had gone before him. That one author should have composed the Iliad and Odyssey is not without example; but he must have possessed gifts of knowledge and genius in as large a measure as was ever bestowed upon man. That many poets should not only have possessed an equal measure of these endowments, but that they should have worked in the same spirit, conceived not only the leading characters, but a vast number of subordinate ones, in the same way, marked their appearance, their actions, their speech, by precisely the same traits, so that each and all should on each and every occasion conduct themselves consistently, express themselves according to their special characteristics-so that they should have given not only to the modern reader, but, so far as we know, to those who lived nearest the times

of the composition of the poems, an abiding and all but universal impression of the unity of their origin-that these extraordinary results and unparalleled coincidences should have been accomplished by a troop or succession of poets, requires a marvellous amount of credulity on the part of the critics who refuse to believe in the existence of Homer and in the unity of his works. The fidelity of the author of the Iliad and Odyssey to nature; the minute and accurate observation of the peculiarities of each region through which the action and the narrative move; the descriptive epithets applied to hills, rivers, plains, mountains, seas, and islands; the exact descriptions of storms and currents in the Mediterranean and the character of the coast; the correct perspective, so to speak, of each scene, argue strongly in favor of the single undivided authorship of these immortal poems. -The Homeric poetry was the bright consummate flower of Ionian genius. The mind of its author grasped all the knowledge of his age, and embraced the whole extent of human life in its heights and depths. He measured the strength of manly passion, and sounded the abysses of the human heart. Over all the varied and contrasted scenes which his genius touched, he poured the illumination of a bright and genial spirit, which must for ever draw to the heroic age of youthful Greece the generous heart of kindred youth wherever the love of song and the passion for literary culture have found a home. The peculiarity in the position of the Iliad and Odyssey is, that they hold their place as the last product in the growth of a popular and national minstrelsy, and embody in the richest rhythmical forms the heroic life of the ancestors of the poet's own contemporaries; and they stand, in subject, substance, and spirit, in the closest relation with the lyric and dramatic poetry and the plastic art of the Greeks in the subsequent ages. -The best editions of Homer are: Barnes (2 vols. 4to., Cambridge, 1711); Ernesti's Clarke (5 vols. 8vo., Leipsic, 1759-'64), and the Glasgow reprint (1814 and 1824); Wolf, Homeri et Homeridarum Opera (Halle, 1794, and 1804-7), with the Prolegomena; Heyne's great edition of the Iliad (8 vols. 8vo., Leipsic and London, 1802); Spitzner's Iliad (Gotha, 1832-'6); Bekker's (text, Berlin, 1843). Very useful editions are: F. H. Bothe, Homeri Carmina (2 vols. 8vo., Leipsic, 1834), with a Latin commentary; G. C. Crusius, Homeri Ilias (1 vol. 8vo., Hanover, 1837), and Homeri Odyssaa (1 vol. 8vo., Hanover, 1837), both with German notes; G. Bärmlein, Homeri Opera (2 vols. 8vo., Leipsic, 1854), with an able Commentatio de Homero ejusque Carminibus prefixed. The editions by Prof. J. J. Owen of New York are excellently adapt ed to the use of schools. Of illustrative works the most important are the commentaries of Nitsch on the Odyssey (Hanover, 1825); Buttmann's Lexilogus, translated by Fishlake (London, 2d ed., 1840); "Introduction to the Study of the Greek Classic Poets," by Henry Nelson

Coleridge, reprinted from the English edition (12mo., Boston, 1842); "Lexicon of the Poems of Homer and the Homerida," translated from the German of G. C. Crusius, by Henry Smith (Hartford, 1844; a most useful work); Mure's History of Greek Literature;" and above all, the "Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age," by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone (3 vols. 8vo., Oxford, 1858). The English translations are those of Chapman, Pope, Cowper, and Sotheby. Portions have been admirably rendered by Dr. Maginn, in ballad measures. The best translation of the entire Iliad is by the late William Mumford, of Richmond, Va. (2 vols. 8vo., Boston, 1846). Two books of the Iliad, the 1st and 24th, have been translated in English hexameters, in "Blackwood's Magazine;" and the first 6 books, in the same metre, by Mr. Shadwell.

HOMESTEAD, the place where one's dwelling is. We mean by this the home itself, with the outbuildings connected with it, and a portion of the land, as the garden, and it may be some fields, &c. It is obvious, however, that if one owns a large tract of land, and lives upon a corner of it, he cannot claim that the whole is a homestead in law; and yet there are no sufficient rules nor precedents for determining how much of this land is thus attached to the dwelling. It has been in fact said by the courts that there is no positive rule; and that the exact meaning of the word must be determined in each case by gathering from the context of the instrument in which it is used, and from the circumstances of the case, its intended extent and operation. It is to be the more regretted that we have no exact definition of the word, because by the recent laws of many of our states it has become of much importance. They make the homestead secure against attaching creditors, and in most cases offer no other definition of it than by mere value. Thus the law exempts from attachment, or surrender in insolvency, a homestead, not exceeding in value $500, in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, and Ohio; 40 acres, not exceeding that sum in value, in Alabama; $1,000 in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois; 200 acres, or $1,000 if in a city, in Texas; and $5,000 in California. On what part of the land, or by whose selection, or on what principle, this quantity in value shall be discriminated, does not seem to be determined by statute provision.

HOMICIDE, in criminal law, the killing of one human being by another. By the common law, it is not homicide to kill an infant before its birth, the authorities declaring that if one purposely kills a babe not yet born, it is only a misdemeanor and not a felony; but if the child is born alive and then dies from the previous injury, it is felony. And every part must be born alive, but the umbilical cord need not be parted; nor need the child have breathed, if it otherwise had life. So, if one intending to procure abortion does an act which causes a child to be born prematurely, and being so born,

it dies because not mature enough to live, this is murder. But where a woman cut off the head of her child before it was wholly born, it was held not to be murder. The crime of child murder and wilful abortion is made punishable in many of our states by statute. Homicide is divided into 3 classes, justifiable, excusable, and felonious. Felonious homicide is either manslaughter or murder, which will be treated under those titles. In this article we shall speak only of homicide which is justifiable, and that which is excusable. These two are often confounded, and are sometimes spoken of as if they were the same thing, even in technical books of criminal law. But this is an inaccuracy. Justifiable homicide is that which is just and right, and not to be regretted; while excusable homicide is that for which excuses may be of fered which take away wilful guilt from the killer, however much the act may be lamented. In this strict sense, there is perhaps no justifiable homicide except that which is committed officially and in the discharge of a legal duty. That is, there is no homicide strictly justifiable except the homicide by an executioner, or that of a public enemy in open war. If one, at great risk to himself, and in defence of the innocent, encounters and destroys an assassin, who could not otherwise be prevented from putting many to death and inflicting injuries worse than death, he may deserve and receive general applause. And the excuse extends much beyond those crimes which are punishable with death; be cause a man would be excused for putting an offender to death if that were the only way of preventing certain crimes, which if committed might not be punished with death, such as rape, burglary with arms, or robbery with arms. Again, the excuse in this case, as in that of self-defence, does not depend altogether upon the actual facts of the case, but much, and perhaps principally, upon the appearance of it to the person committing the homicide; for if, as a reasonable man, he was fully justified in believing that the peril from which he could deliver himself only by homicide was actual and imminent, the excuse is not taken away by proof that he was deceived. Thus, if one were attacked by an assailant threatening to shoot him with a pistol, and would be justified under the circumstances in killing his assailant if the pistol were loaded and the assailant intended to use it, and the assailed party had reason to believe this to be the case, his excuse would not be lessened by proof that the pistol was not loaded and his death not intended. The excuses for homicide sometimes mingle; thus one who is attacked by a murderer and cannot otherwise escape, may put him to death, either to prevent this felony, or to save his own life. But one who would escape the consequences of homicide by the excuse of self-defence, must be able to show that there was some overt act on the part of the assailant, and that the assailed was not moved by threats only, or merely by fears of what would be done, however just and rational

they might be; but waited until some act took place to protect himself, not merely from fatal violence, but from grievous bodily injury. What this means is not plainly defined by the law; but it does not mean the injury caused by a blow from a fist or a stick, or a slight wound, which might be painful for a time, but from all effects of which the injured person would certainly and entirely recover within a few days. And here, too, as before, death must not be inflicted until nothing but this remains. That is, the party assailed must retreat as long and as far as he can retreat; must seek and use any refuge or means of escape open to him; and only when these are exhausted, or non-existent, can he put his assailant to death. It should however be stated, as a settled rule of law, that an assailed party, in danger of death or grievous harm, is bound to retreat only when he can do this with safety. For if retreat will only increase a danger already imminent, and give his assailant new power over him, he need not retreat at all, but may at once inflict death upon his assailant. So, too, homicide is excusable if inflicted as the only means of preventing a great crime. Here the law comes in with what may seem to be a definition; for it says that one may inflict death if there be no other way to prevent a felony. But the reader will see, under the word FELONY, that its meaning is quite undetermined; and there are things which are still called felonies, at least in England, of which we should be unwilling to say that they might lawfully be prevented by putting the offender to death. And yet it must be certain that the law would call this only excusable homicide, and not justifiable. Excusable homicide is then that which is caused by self-defence, or the prevention of great crime, or accident. It is excusable by reason of self-defence, if it were strictly necessary for this purpose, and not otherwise. We believe that there is no rule of criminal law which ought to be more certain, and more universally acknowledged, than that homicide in self-defence must be grounded upon a strict and absolute necessity. It cannot be doubted that any one may save his own life by taking the life of his assailant; but it is equally certain, as matter of law, that he must not secure his safety by homicide, provided he could secure it in any other way, as by retreating, or seeking refuge, or inflicting a less than fatal injury. We suppose that any difficulty which belongs to this subject must attend upon the application of these principles, and not upon the principles themselves. Thus, it is certain that the laws of England and of the United States agree in an absolute refusal to recognize the point of honor in cases of homicide. Juries, and possibly courts, may be influenced by it, perhaps unconsciously; but the law ignores it. If one attacks another with every form and method of insult, and the attacked party, finding no other way of stopping the insult or escaping from it, puts the assailant to death, it is felonious and not excusable homicide. So, also,