radition? The more we
read, and the more we think--think as becomes the readers of Homer,--the
more rooted becomes the conviction that the Father of Poetry gave us this
rich inheritance, whole and entire. Whatever were the means of its
preservation, let us rather be thankful for the treasury of taste and
eloquence thus laid open to our use, than seek to make it a mere centre
around which to drive a series of theories, whose wildness is only
equalled by their inconsistency with each other.

As the hymns, and some other poems usually ascribed to Homer, are not
included in Pope's translation, I will content myself with a brief account
of the Battle of the Frogs and Mice, from the pen of a writer who has done
it full justice(37):--

"This poem," says Coleridge, "is a short mock-heroic of ancient
date. The text varies in different editions, and is obviously
disturbed and corrupt to a great degree; it is commonly said to
have been a juvenile essay of Homer's genius; others have
attributed it to the same Pigrees, mentioned above, and whose
reputation for humour seems to have invited the appropriation of
any piece of ancient wit, the author of which was uncertain; so
little did the Greeks, before the age of the Ptolemies, know or
care about that department of criticism employed in determining
the genuineness of ancient writings. As to this little poem being
a youthful prolusion of Homer, it seems sufficient to say that
from the beginning to the end it is a plain and palpable parody,
not only of the general spirit, but of the numerous passages of
the Iliad itself; and even, if no such intention to parody were
discernible in it, the objection would still remain, that to
suppose a work of mere burlesque to be the primary effort of
poetry in a simple age, seems to reverse that order in the
development of national taste, which the history of every other
people in Europe, and of many in Asia, has almost ascertained to
be a law of the human mind; it is in a state of society much more
refined and permanent than that described in the Iliad, that any
popularity would attend such a ridicule of war and the gods as is
contained in this poem; and the fact of there having existed three
other poems of the same kind attributed, for aught we can see,
with as much reason to Homer, is a strong inducement to believe
that none of them were of