"When we use the word Homer, we do not mean a person historically known to us, like Pope or Milton. We mean in the main the author, whoever or whatever he was, of the wonderful poems called respectively, not by the author, but by the world, the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey.' His name is conventional, and its sense in etymology is not very different from that which would be conveyed by our phrase, 'the author.' … At the first dawn of the historic period, we find the poems established in popular renown; and so prominent that a school of minstrels takes the name of 'Homeridæ' from making it their business to preserve and to recite them. Still, the question whether the poems as we have them can be trusted, whether they present substantially the character of what may be termed original documents, is one of great but gradually diminishing difficulty. It is also of importance, because of the nature of their contents. In the first place, they give a far greater amount of information than is to be found in any other literary production of the same compass. In the second place, that information, speaking of it generally, is to be had nowhere else. In the third place, it is information of the utmost interest, and even of great moment. It introduces to us, in the very beginnings of their experience, the most gifted people of the world, and enables us to judge how they became such as in later times we know them. … And this picture is exhibited with such a fulness both of particulars and of vital force, that perhaps never in any country has an age been so completely placed upon record. … We are … probably to conceive of Homer as of a Bard who went from place to place to earn his bread by his profession, to exercise his knowledge in his gift of song, and to enlarge it by an ever-active observation of nature and experience of men. … It has … been extensively believed that he was a Greek of Asia Minor. And as there were no Greeks of Asia Minor at the time of the Trojan War, nor until a wide and searching revolution in the peninsula had substituted Dorian manners for those of the earlier Achaian age, which Homer sang, this belief involves the further proposition that the poet was severed by a considerable interval of time from the subjects of his verse. The last-named opinion depends very much upon the first; and the first chiefly, if not wholly, upon a perfectly vague tradition, which has no pretence to an historical character. … The question … has to be decided … by the internal evidence of the poems. This evidence, I venture to say, strongly supports the belief that Homer was an European, and if an European, then certainly also an Achaian Greek: a Greek, that is to say, of the pre-Doric period, when the Achaian name prevailed and principally distinguished the race. … Until the 18th century of our era was near its