The Mosaic books, and the other historical books of the Old Testament, are not intended to present, and do not present, a picture of human society, or of our nature drawn at large. Their aim is to exhibit it in one master-relation, and to do this with effect, they do it, to a great extent, exclusively. The Homeric materials for exhibiting that relation are different in kind as well as in degree: but as they paint, and paint to the very life, the whole range of our nature, and the entire circle of human action and experience, at an epoch much more nearly analogous to the patriarchal time than to any later age, the poems of Homer may be viewed, in the philosophy of human nature, as the complement of the earliest portion of the Sacred Records.
Although the close and systematic study of the Homeric text has begun at a date comparatively recent, yet the marked development of riches from within which it has produced, has already been a real, permanent, and vast addition to the mental wealth of mankind. We can now better understand than formerly much that relates to the fame and authority of this great poet in early times, and that we may formerly have contemplated as fanciful, exaggerated, or unreal. It was, we can now see, with no idle wonder that, while Greek philosophers took texts from him so largely in their schools, the Greek public listened to his strains in places of thronged resort, and in their solemn assemblages, and Greek warriors and statesmen kept him in their cabinets and under their pillows; and, for the first and last time in the history of the world, made the preservation of a poet’s compositions an object of permanent public policy.
[1] Revised and enlarged from the ‘Essay on the place of Homer in Classical education and in Historical inquiry,’ which was contained in the ‘Oxford Essays’ for 1857, published by Mr. J. W. Parker.
[3] While speaking of this eminent labourer in the field of Homeric inquiry, I must not pass by the sympathising spirit and imagination of Mr. H. Nelson Coleridge, the admirably turned Homeric tone of the ballads of Dr. Maginn, or the valuable analysis contained in the uncompleted ‘Homerus’ of Archdeacon Williams. But of all the criticisms on Homer which I have ever had the good fortune to read, in our own or any language, the most vivid and entirely genial are those found in the ‘Essays Critical and Imaginative’ of the late Professor Wilson. In that most useful, and I presume I may add standard, work, Smith’s ‘Dictionary of Classical Biography and Mythology,’ I am sorry to find that the important article Homerus, by Dr. Ihne, though it has the merit of presenting the question in a clear light, yet is neither uniformly accurate in its references to the text of Homer, nor at all in conformity with the prevailing state at least of English opinion upon the controversy.