f the bards, which well knew how to efface itself in order to
ravish the listener the more. But allowing much to the power of
art, the mind was not yet satisfied. We have said the poems seemed
to carry with them their own evidence that they were not undiluted
fiction, but contained at least an element of objective, perhaps
traditional, truth. It was a beautiful world they told of, and yet
it was a world apart. Agamemnon in the field and Achilles in his
tent; Priam in his palace; Odysseus in his travels; Alcinous with
his retainers, and Arete with her daughter; Penelope and Telemachus
in the midst of the wicked suitors, and the old swineherd and the
faithful nurse; the very shades of the Dead beyond the streams of
Oceanus--how could the bards describe all these wonders if they
had not lived in a world of their own, or at least acquired the
knowledge of it from their immediate predecessors? The gorgeous
palaces of the Kings, with their walls of bronze, their gold and
silver ewers and basins, and their carven bedsteads and chairs
of state and footstools; and all the glittering raiment and the
golden-studded sceptres, and golden-hilted swords, and silvern
ankle-bands, and the ivory and amber and inlaid metal-work, and
the iron-axled chariots with eight spokes to the wheel, and the
crimson-cheeked ships and the fair-cheeked maidens, and the stateliness
and grace amid the splendour of it all--why should we obstinately
refuse to believe that these bards knew more than we--that they
had seen the vision with their mortal eye before they took the
brush in hand to paint the picture?[*]

[Footnote *: H. Browne, 'Homeric Study,' pp. 242, 243.]

Two lines of evidence, then, if given their fair weight, seemed
to point in the same direction. On the one hand, there were the
legends of a prehistoric age of heroes, with their travels and
expeditions and wars, legends with which Greek literature teemed,
and which, however inextricably blended with fancy, and with details
obviously monstrous and impossible, can scarcely be supposed to
have sprung into being without something behind them to account
for their existence. On the other hand, there was this strange,
wonderful, realistic world of the Homeric poems, no longer existing,
it is true, even at the earliest stage of Greek history, but almost
absolutely refusing to be dismissed as a mere figment of the
imagination. Was it, then, impossible to believe that in the bosom
of the great gulf