quity and suggesting itself
to the modern reader, who very naturally thinks that Homer is giving
some traits of himself in his picture of the blind singer. So much we
may grant: some traits of himself, but not all by any means; Homer
doubtless upon occasion could sing a short lay of Troy for the
amusement of his audience, like Demodocus; but in such a part he is
only a wee fragment of the author of those magnificent works, the Iliad
and the Odyssey. The total Homer builds totalities, by the very
necessity of his genius.

Who, then, according to the theory, put these ballads together? Wolf,
fully possessed of the notion that Demodocus is Homer, starts to
account for the present form of the poems, which he assigns to the
shaping hand of Peisistratus and his college of editors, critics, and
poetasters. That is, the grand marvel of Homeric poetry, the mighty
constructive act thereof, he ascribes to a set of men essentially
barren and uncreative, for all of which he cites some very dubious and
inadequate ancient authority.

Here again we may be permitted to trace the Wolfian consciousness to
its origin, for origin it has in time and circumstance. Wolf was a
professor in a University, and his department was philology; his ideas
on Homer are really drawn from his vocation and his surroundings. Why
should he not make a philologer and a professor the author of the
Homeric poems? So he came to imagine that the tyrant Peisistratus 500
B.C. had under his patronage a kind of German University, or at least
a philological seminary, whose professors really constructed Homer as
we now have him, having put him together out of antecedent ballads
which the actual Homer and many others may have made ages before. Wolf,
therefore, is the founder of two philological seminaries; one at the
University of Berlin, and the other at the court of Peisistratus. Great
is the professor in smelling out the professor anywhere; still we
cannot help thinking that what Wolf ascribed to the old Greek seminary,
was done only at his German seminary, namely, the patching together of
Homer out of ballads.

_FABLELAND._

The movement of the second grand division of the poem, the Ulyssiad,
has passed through two of its stages, which have been already
considered; the third is now reached which we have called Fableland,
though it may be said that the two previous lands are also fabulous.
Let it then be named the Fairy World, though this term also does no