Such are the meagre facts which can be gathered amid the obscurity of that remote age in which Homer lived. There is something painful in this barrenness,—and we almost feel that the critics, in exploding the fond fictions which antiquity has woven around the name of the great poet, have performed an ungracious office. They have indeed dissipated fables, but they have left us little but darkness or vacuity in their place. Such is the yearning of the mind, in respect to those who have excited its emotions, and created an interest in the bosom, that it will cherish even the admitted portraitures of fiction and fancy, rather than content itself with the blank canvass of nothingness. The heart, as well as nature, abhors a vacuum. The fictitious history of Homer—which, however, is of some antiquity, and has passed current for centuries—is briefly as follows. His mother was named Critheis: she was married to Mæon, king of Smyrna, and gave birth to a child, on or near the banks of the river Meles, from which circumstance he was called Meles genes. The mother soon died, and he was brought up and educated under the care of Mæon. The name of Homer was afterwards given to him, on account of his becoming blind. The legends proceed in general to state that Homer himself became a schoolmaster and poet of great celebrity, at Smyrna, and remained there till Mentes, a foreign merchant, induced him to travel. That the author of the Iliad and Odyssey must have travelled pretty extensively for those times, is unquestionable; for besides the accurate knowledge of Greece which these works display, it is clear that the poet had a familiar acquaintance with the islands both in the Ægean and the Ionian seas, the coasts of Asia Minor, Crete, Cyprus, and Egypt—which still bear the names he gave them—and possessed also distinct information with respect to Lybia, Æthiopia, Phoenicia, Caria and Phrygia. In his travels, as the legends say, Homer visited Ithaca, and there became subject to a disease in his eyes, which afterwards terminated in total blindness. From this island he is said to have gone to Italy, and even to Spain; but there is no sign, in either of the two poems, of his possessing any definite knowledge westward of the Ionian sea. Wherever he went, Homer recited his verses, which were universally admired, except at Smyrna, where he was a prophet in his own country. At Phocæa, a schoolmaster, of the name of Thestorides, obtained from Homer a copy of his poetry, and then sailed to Chios, and there recited these verses as his own. Homer went soon after to the same place, and was rescued by Glaucus, a goatherd, from the attack of his dogs, and brought by him to Bolissus, a town in Chios, where he resided a long time, in the possession of wealth and a splendid reputation.