e. The task of demolition is a fascinating one.
It possesses a charm impossible to explain, and impossible to fail to
perceive. When one has a taste, it is much as with the tiger which has
tasted blood. Such procedure seems to open vistas before men. Here
are open doors, from behind which seems to come a voice crying, "Enter."

It will be chronologically accurate if we shall first notice the
iconoclastic spirit as exemplified in the attack on the unity of the
Iliad; and I class this with the nineteenth-century doings because it
belongs to the spirit of that century, and was almost within its
borders. The Iliad had been the glory of international literature for
centuries. Greece held it in veneration from the beginning of its
authentic history; and that work had blazed with a solar luster out of
the Stygian darkness of prehistoric times. The book had made an epoch
in literature. The cyclic poets, who, for centuries after the
appearance of the Iliad and Odyssey, were the only Greek bards, were
confessedly disciples of one Homer, the reputed author of the poems
which embody the fact of the war of the races. The judgment of
antiquity was: (_a_) These two works were ascribed to a single author.
(_b_) This author was the master at whose wave of wand these revels had
begun. In other words, Homer wrote the books which bear his name.
However much they might discuss the location of the half-fabled Ilium,
or marvel over the battles fought "far on the ringing plains of windy
Troy," it was not doubted that a sublime and solitary bard conceived
and wrought the wondrous work ascribed to him. It is not shown that
this question was even mooted in the former times. Cities contended
for the honor of having given this man birth. He was as much a verity
as Pericles. Such was the status of the case when our century beheld
it first. Bentley had hinted at the probability or possibility of
separate authorship; but it remained for German criticism, in the
person of Wolf, to make the onslaught on the time-honored belief. The
attack was as impetuous as the charge of the Greeks across the plain of
the Scamander. It astonished the world. It abashed scholarship.
Grave philosophers and gifted poets were carried away in the rush of
the attack. Goethe gave and Schiller withheld allegiance. The Atomist
and Separatist for a time held the field. Wolf showed, by reasoning
which he deemed irrefutable, that the Iliad could not have been
c