were considered to have been finally refuted. Can
there be any more scathing satire upon the value of literary
criticism? It would seem as though Minerva had shed the same thick
darkness over both the poems as she shed over Ulysses, so that they
might go in and out among the dons of Oxford and Cambridge from
generation to generation, and none should see them. If I am right,
as I believe I am, in holding the Odyssey to have been written by a
young woman, was ever sleeping beauty more effectually concealed
behind a more impenetrable hedge of dulness?--and she will have to
sleep a good many years yet before anyone wakes her effectually.
But what else can one expect from people, not one of whom has been
at the very slight exertion of noting a few of the writer's main
topographical indications, and then looking for them in an Admiralty
chart or two? Can any step be more obvious and easy--indeed, it is
so simple that I am ashamed of myself for not having taken it forty
years ago. Students of the Odyssey for the most part are so
engrossed with the force of the zeugma, and of the enclitic particle
[Greek]; they take so much more interest in the digamma and in the
AEolic dialect, than they do in the living spirit that sits behind
all these things and alone gives them their importance, that,
naturally enough, not caring about the personality, it remains and
always must remain invisible to them.

If I have helped to make it any less invisible to yourselves, let me
ask you to pardon the somewhat querulous tone of my concluding
remarks.

Quis Desiderio . . .? {99}

Like Mr. Wilkie Collins, I, too, have been asked to lay some of my
literary experiences before the readers of the Universal Review. It
occurred to me that the Review must be indeed universal before it
could open its pages to one so obscure as myself; but, nothing
daunted by the distinguished company among which I was for the first
time asked to move, I resolved to do as I was told, and went to the
British Museum to see what books I had written. Having refreshed my
memory by a glance at the catalogue, I was about to try and diminish
the large and ever-increasing circle of my non-readers when I became
aware of a calamity that brought me to a standstill, and indeed bids
fair, so far as I can see at present, to put an end to my literary
existence altogether.

I should explain that I cannot write unless I have a sloping desk,
and the reading-room of the B