hers, and whose
exquisitely graceful skilful workmanship forms such an effective
contrast to the uncouth exterior of the workman. Him, as a man of
genius and an artist, and furthermore as a somewhat despised artist,
Homer treats, if with playfulness, still with respect, in spite of
the fact that circumstances have thrown him more on the side of the
Greeks than of the Trojans, with whom I understand Homer's
sympathies mainly to lie.

The poet either dislikes music or is at best insensible to it.
Great poets very commonly are so. Achilles, indeed, does on one
occasion sing to his own accompaniment on the lyre, but we are not
told that it was any pleasure to hear him, and Patroclus, who was in
the tent at the time, was not enjoying it; he was only waiting for
Achilles to leave off. But though not fond of music, Homer has a
very keen sense of the beauties of nature, and is constantly
referring both in and out of season to all manner of homely
incidents that are as familiar to us as to himself. Sparks in the
train of a shooting-star; a cloud of dust upon a high road;
foresters going out to cut wood in a forest; the shrill cry of the
cicale; children making walls of sand on the sea-shore, or teasing
wasps when they have found a wasps' nest; a poor but very honest
woman who gains a pittance for her children by selling wool, and
weighs it very carefully; a child clinging to its mother's dress and
crying to be taken up and carried--none of these things escape him.
Neither in the Iliad nor the Odyssey do we ever receive so much as a
hint as to the time of year at which any of the events described are
happening; but on one occasion the author of the Iliad really has
told us that it was a very fine day, and this not from a business
point of view, but out of pure regard to the weather for its own
sake.

With one more observation I will conclude my preliminary remarks
about the Iliad. I cannot find its author within the four corners
of the work itself. I believe the writer of the Odyssey to appear
in the poem as a prominent and very fascinating character whom we
shall presently meet, but there is no one in the Iliad on whom I can
put my finger with even a passing idea that he may be the author.
Still, if under some severe penalty I were compelled to find him, I
should say it was just possible that he might consider his own lot
to have been more or less like that which he forecasts for Astyanax,
the infant son of Hector. At