enough; for had he read the Alexandrian poets,
Theoeritus especially, or Behr A'Adin among the Arabs,
to speak of no others, he could not possibly have had
courage left to maintain his theory; and with him,
really, it seems more a matter of courage than of
facts, notwithstanding his evident training in a
scientific atmosphere."

GLADSTONE ON THE WOMEN OF HOMER

The divers specifications of my ignorance and stupidity contained in
the foregoing criticisms will be attended to in their proper place in
the chronological order of the present chapter, which naturally begins
with Homer's epics, as nothing definite is known of Greek literature
before them. Homer is now recognized as the first poet of antiquity,
not only in the order of time; but it took Europe many centuries to
discover that fact. During the Middle Ages the second-rate Virgil was
held to be a much greater genius than Homer, and it was in England, as
Professor Christ notes (69), that the truer estimate originated.
Pope's translation of the Homeric poems, with all its faults, helped
to dispel the mists of ignorance, and in 1775 appeared Robert Wood's
book, _On the Original Genius and Writings of Homer_, which combated
the foolish prejudice against the poet, due to the coarseness of the
manners he depicts. Wood admits (161) that "most of Homer's heroes
would, in the present age, be capitally convicted, in any country in
Europe, on the poet's evidence;" but this, he explains, does not
detract from the greatness of Homer, who, upon an impartial view,
"will appear to excel his own state of society, in point of decency
and delicacy, as much as he has surpassed more polished ages in point
of genius."

In this judicious discrimination between the genius of Homer and the
realistic coarseness of his heroes, Wood forms an agreeable contrast
to many modern Homeric scholars, notably the Rt. Hon. W.E. Gladstone,
who, having made this poet his hobby, tried to persuade himself and
his readers that nearly everything relating not only to Homer, but to
the characters he depicts, was next door to perfection. Confining
ourselves to the topic that concerns us here, we read, in his _Studies
on Homer_ (II., 502), that "we find throughout the poems those signs
of the overpowering force of conjugal attachments which ... we might
expect." And in his shorter treatise on Homer he thus sums up his
views as to the position and estimate of woman in the he