another incident; and again, after an
interval, another? Each time with the intention to make a
complete and separate poem; each time going to it influenced by
the natural changes of his mood; now preoccupied with one hero or
god, now with another. The Tennyson in his twenties, who wrote
the fairylike _Lady of Shalott,_ was a very different man in mood
and outlook from the Mid-Victorian Tennyson who wrote the
execrable _Merlin and Vivien;_ but both were possessed with the
Arthurian legend. At thirty and at fifty you may easily take
different views of the same men and incidents. The Iliad, I
suggest, may be explained as the imperfect fusion of many poems
and many moods and periods of life of a single poet. It was not
until the time of Pisistratus, remember, that it was edited into
a single epic.

Now these many poems, before Pisistratus took them in hand, had
been in the keeping for perhaps three centuries of wandering
minstrels--Rhapsodoi, Aoidoi, Citharaedi and Homeridae, as they
were called--who drifted about the Isles of Greece and Asiatic
mainland during the long period of Greek insignificance and
unculture. The first three orders were doubtless in existence
long before Homer was born; they were the bards, trouveurs and
minnesingers of their time; their like are the instruments of
culture in any race during its pralayas. So you find the
professional story-tellers in the East today. But the Homeridae
may well have been--as De Quincey suggests--an order specially
trained in the chanting of Homeric poems; perhaps a single
school founded in some single island by or for the sake of Homer.
We hear that Lycurgus was the first who brought Homer--the works,
not the man--into continental Greece; importing them from Crete.
That means, probably, that he induced Homeridae to settle
in Sparta. European continental Greece would in any case
have been much behind the rest of the Greek world in culture;
because furthest from and the least in touch with West Asian
civilization. Crete was nearer to Egypt; the Greeks of Asia
Minor to Lydia; as for the islanders of the Cyclades and
Sporades, the necessity of gadding about would have brought them
into contact with their betters to the south and east, and so
awakened them, much sooner than their fellow Greeks of Attica,
Boeotia, and the Peloponnese.

Where did Homer live? Naturally, as a wandering bard, all over
the place. We know of the seven cities that claimed to be