e not quoted anything like all the absurd remarks made by
Alcinous, nor shown you nearly as completely as I could do if I had
more time how obviously the writer is quietly laughing at him in her
sleeve. She understands his little ways as she understands those of
Menelaus, who tells Telemachus and Pisistratus that if they like he
will take them a personally conducted tour round the Peloponnese,
and that they can make a good thing out of it, for everyone will
give them something--fancy Helen or Queen Arete making such a
proposal as this. They are never laughed at, but then they are
women, whereas Alcinous and Menelaus are men, and this makes all the
difference.

And now in conclusion let me point out the irony of literature in
connection with this astonishing work. Here is a poem in which the
hero and heroine have already been married many years before it
begins: it is marked by a total absence of love-business in such
sense as we understand it: its interest centres mainly in the fact
of a bald elderly gentleman, whose little remaining hair is red,
being eaten out of house and home during his absence by a number of
young men who are courting the supposed widow--a widow who, if she
be fair and fat, can hardly also be less than forty. Can any
subject seem more hopeless? Moreover, this subject so initially
faulty is treated with a carelessness in respect of consistency,
ignorance of commonly known details, and disregard of ordinary
canons, that can hardly be surpassed, and yet I cannot think that in
the whole range of literature there is a work which can be
decisively placed above it. I am afraid you will hardly accept
this; I do not see how you can be expected to do so, for in the
first place there is no even tolerable prose translation, and in the
second, the Odyssey, like the Iliad, has been a school book for over
two thousand five hundred years, and what more cruel revenge than
this can dullness take on genius? The Iliad and Odyssey have been
used as text-books for education during at least two thousand five
hundred years, and yet it is only during the last forty or fifty
that people have begun to see that they are by different authors.
There was, indeed, so I learn from Colonel Mure's valuable work, a
band of scholars some few hundreds of years before the birth of
Christ, who refused to see the Iliad and Odyssey as by the same
author, but they were snubbed and snuffed out, and for more than two
thousand years