by a good text--Wolf, with his startling anti-Homeric gospel, made so many proselytes, and such fervid apostles, among the learned and the poetic of his countrymen? Plainly this, that he seized with a keen glance, and a grand comprehensiveness, the minstrel character of the POPULAR EPOS of early ages, as distinguished from the more artificial and curiously-piled compositions of more polished times, bearing the same name. Wolf was wrong--say mad, if you please--in asserting that Pisistratus, with a whole army of such refurbishers of old wares as Onomacritus, could have put together such a glowing vital whole as the _Iliad_; but he was right, and altogether sound, when he looked upon the great Epic song of the wrath of Achilles as a thing essentially different, not only in degree, but in kind, from the _Æneid_ of Virgil, or the _Paradise Lost_ of our Milton. Many men of learning and taste, from Scaliger downwards, have instituted large and curious comparisons between the great national Epos of the Greeks, and that of the Romans; but the comparison of things that have a radically different character can seldom produce any result beyond the mere expression of liking and disliking; as if, among critics of trees, one should say, _I prefer a bristling pine_, while another says, _Give me the smooth beech_. Or, a result even more unsatisfactory might be produced. Starting from the beech as a sort of model tree, a forest critic, predetermined to admire the pine also, might spin out of his brain a number of subtle analogies to prove that a pine, though bearing a different name, is, in fact, the same tree as a beech, and possesses, when _more_ philosophically considered, all the essential characteristics of this tree. You laugh?--but so, and not otherwise, did it fare with old Homer, at the hands of many professional philologists and literary dilettantes, who, with a perfect appreciation of such works of polished skill as the _Æneid_ and the _Jerusalem Delivered_--as being akin to their own modern taste--must needs apply the same test to take cognisance of such strange and far-removed objects as the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. Such transference of the mould that measures one thing to another, and an altogether different thing, is indeed a common enough trick of our every-day judgments; but it is, nevertheless, a sort of criticism altogether barren of any positive results, and which ends where it begins--in talk. To the character and certainty of a science, it can assuredly have no claim. If you wish to descant with any beneficial result upon roses, pray compare one English rose with another, and not with a Scotch thistle. Bring not the fine city dame into contact with the brown country girl; but let Lady B's complexion be more delicate than Lady C's, and the brown of Bessie be more healthy than that of Jessie. Jessie, if you will consider the matter, has nothing in common with Lady B, except this, that she is a woman. As little has Homer in