THERE are some delusions so agreeable, that we are unwilling to have them dispelled, and he who should offer to correct them would excite our anger rather than awaken our gratitude. It is folly to be wise, when ignorance is bliss. How much pleasure many a one would be deprived of, who believes in the actual reality of the sufferings and exploits of the earliest and most cultivated acquaintance of his childhood, Robinson Crusoe, if it were demonstrated to him that this personage was but a shadowy fiction of De Foe's. Why seek to convince your neighbor, that he is as addle-pated as Don Quixote himself, if he credits the fleshand-blood existence of that tilter of windmills and Chevalier Bayard among sheep-flocks? If one were to offer to do away with those "absurdities" which affect the whole groundwork of the early Greek and Roman history, those incredible myths of the she-wolf's foster-children and the ravings of Achilles before Troy, we should regard him as a "lunatic at large," and say with Horace, "I think all Anticyra was designed for such as these." We should shrink

from such a proposition with nearly as much horror as from an offer to convince us of the non-existence of the Pilgrims and the Mayflower. As Erasmus thought the reformation of Luther would overturn all religion, instead of purifying the Church, so we regard the consequences of this purging of Clio's records as the subversion of profane history. Homer is at once a lying old reprobate, and our indignation is proportionate to the length of the hoax. To these reformers of history, Achilles, if he is anything at all, is a piratical chieftain, the Lafitte of the Archipelago, Ajax and Agamemnon are freebooters, and the whole historical account of the Trojan war is the story of a marauding expedition of Grecian buccaneers. But although to us these Homeric infidels appear insane on this one point, still every writer has a claim to his opinion, and the right to promulgate such opinion, and the just critic will always give him a fair hearing. Let us now play the part of the impartial judge, and consider with patience the arguments of those who would have us believe that Troy never was, and that the Iliad and Odyssey are entertaining "novelettes."

Sceptics on this subject are well aware of the general belief of scholars in the authenticity of Homer, and of the great difficulty they will encounter in their attempts to destroy this belief. For this reason, like true sophists, they endeavor at the outset to influence unfairly the minds of their readers, by striving to excite sympathy for themselves, and to convince men that they are approaching their essays with hostile feelings, which it is incumbent upon them to lay aside in the beginning. But this is not the case; it is their work to remove those feelings. No atheist could claim that we ought to lay aside all prejudices before we listened to his arguments against the existence of the Deity. The prefaces of these sceptics' works are accordingly dissertations on prejudice, and its baleful tendency if opposed to a candid hearing; by this implying indirectly that their readers are under its influence. They openly state

that prejudice consists in a wrong attachment to any object, which adherence is improperly continued without appeal to reason or regard for truth, thus virtually denying that any prejudice is founded in a right attachment, which few will grant. They also urge, that experience shows the difficulty of correcting this wrong propensity, and that opinions conceived in our early days become a part of our system, in succum et sanguinem abeunt; that this evil in this way grows with our growth and strengthens with our strength, and that no alternative can prevail. They cite to us examples of the predilections of the most talented minds, and of the difficulty, if not impossibility, of weaning them from their longcherished and erroneous opinions. From these premises, leading us by an appeal to our good feelings, they are prone to assume the very conclusion that was to be proved, namely, that our opinions are wrong. We are thus unconsciously brought to believe that we have been doing great injustice to the class of which these pleaders are representatives, and therefore by way of atonement we receive with greater readiness those arguments as valid, which without this bias of the mind we should instantly reject as trifling and fallacious.

The Iliad and Odyssey must have had some historical basis. However much we attribute to the prolific imagination of the poet, there is still beneath or behind all a substructure or framework of facts, which must have been readily believed by his contemporaries, if not known to them; otherwise these poems would have been unintelligible, and would never have been preserved, or else they would have been unnatural, and for this reason rejected at once as romance or fable. If we admit then as historical some portions of the poems, our next inquiry is as to the probabilities of the particular events related in them; that is, whether it is likely there was a regular siege of Troy, or whether the historical basis is a series of freebooting expeditions conducted by the leaders of the Grecian states. In confirma

tion of the war we have the same authorities as we had for the confirmation of the existence of the city of Troy, and since we have these, a just criticism requires us to give some credit as an historian, inasmuch as these writers were undoubtedly led to their belief, as we have intimated, by many monuments that time and barbarism have since destroyed. Of course there is much that is fabulous that the ancients separated from the historical as we do now, and there is much exaggeration which they made allowance for, as being essential to the interest of the whole. They did not credit the birth of Helen from an egg, they did not believe that Achilles was immersed in the Styx, and was therefore invulnerable except in the fated heel; but enough could be quoted to prove that, on the whole, they regarded the capture of Troy as an historical event, and Homer's poems rather as history than poetry. We cannot prove that Homer intended to write a history, and not an epic; we can only answer the objections of his detractors by showing that those statements which most bear the appearance of history are natural and possible. That we may have some guide in this task, we propose to consider in order the objections alleged by the first modern Homeric infidel, Jacob Bryant.

At the very outset this sceptic has destroyed all confidence in his quotations from the classics, by imitating the sophists, in garbling statements, or rather in quoting those passages which were not written by Thucydides with any reference to the war, and in omitting to bring forward his remarks in which he expresses his reasons for believing that such a war did take place. And not content with this unjust treatment of the historian, fearing lest, distrusting his selections, we consult the original, Bryant by way of caution reminds us that Thucydides could not set aside the Trojan war because the glory of Greece was greatly increased by it, and her religion sanctioned. In a word, Thucydides is not to be credited as an historian in a matter with which the

glory and religion of his country are connected. We wish that space would permit us to cite all that this writer says on Homer and the war; but any one who will read the first twelve chapters of the first book will be convinced that Thucydides had no desire to set aside the Trojan war, but rather seems, as it were, to anticipate Bryant's objections to the number of ships and men by stating that the wonder is, not that so many ships went, but that there were not more. He even makes it a matter of comment that the expedition, though Homer might be distrusted, as all poets should be on account of their proneness to exaggeration, yet making allowance for this, appears to have been smaller than we have a right to expect when we consider that the armament was furnished by the whole of Greece in common. If Mr. Bryant sets aside Thucydides, because the glory and religion of Greece would not suffer this historian to tell the truth on any subject, he would for the same reason disregard all statements made by Herodotus, and all other Greek authors, on the war of Troy, for surely the glory and religion of their country would equally induce the Father of History and his compatriots to misrepresent their own belief. This is a summary and convenient method of rebutting all testimony which refutes an author's opinions, but too fallacious to need exposure. We are very fortunately able to put out of the question the views of the ancient writers on this subject, and deduce arguments in favor of the credibility of the Trojan war, by consulting facts, and considering the land and naval forces that were levied in Greece from a few districts alone. If we can place any reliance at all on the old historians, the Greeks brought one hundred and ten thousand men into the field at the battle of Platea, and at a time when the Grecian states were not united as they were during the time of the Trojan war. And though Mr. Bryant and his sect may be surprised (for they are easily perplexed) that this should be regarded as an unusual force when Greece abounded in wealth and numbers, while the