furnish increased facilities for obtaining the requisite papyrus to write upon. A reading class, when once formed, would doubtless slowly increase, and the number of manuscripts along with it; so that before the time of Solôn, fifty years afterwards, both readers and manuscripts, though still comparatively few, might have attained a certain recognized authority, and formed a tribunal of reference, against the carelessness of individual rhapsodes. [258] Mr. Fynes Clinton (Fasti Hellenici, vol. i. pp. 368-373) treats it as a matter of _certainty_ that Archilochus and Alkman _wrote_ their poems. I am not aware of any evidence for announcing this as positively known,—except, indeed, an admission of Wolf, which is, doubtless, good as an _argumentum ad hominem_, but is not to be received as proof (Wolf, Proleg. p. 50). The evidences mentioned by Mr. Clinton (p. 368) certainly cannot be regarded as proving anything to the point. Giese (Ueber den Æolischen Dialekt, p. 172) places the first writing of the separate rhapsodies composing the Iliad in the seventh century B. C. We may, I think, consider the Iliad and Odyssey to have been preserved without the aid of writing, for a period near upon two centuries.[259] But is it true, as Wolf imagined, and as other able critics have imagined, also, that the separate portions of which these two poems are composed were originally distinct epical ballads, each constituting a separate whole and intended for separate recitation? Is it true, that they had not only no common author, but originally, neither common purpose nor fixed order, and that their first permanent arrangement and integration was delayed for three centuries, and accomplished at last only by the taste of Peisistratus conjoined with various lettered friends?[260] [259] The songs of the Icelandic Skalds were preserved orally for a period longer than two centuries,—P. A. Müller thinks very much longer,—before they were collected, or embodied in written story by Snorro and Sæmund (Lange, Untersuchungen über die Gesch. der Nördischen Heldensage. p. 98; also, Introduct. pp. xx-xxviii). He confounds, however, often, the preservation of the songs from old time,—with the question, whether they have or have not an historical basis. And there were, doubtless, many old bards and rhapsodes in ancient Greece, of whom the same might be said which Saxo Grammaticus affirms of an Englishman named Lucas, that he was “literis quidem tenuiter instructus, sed historiarum scientiâ apprime eruditus.” (Dahlmann, Historische Forschungen, vol. ii. p. 176.) [260] “Homer wrote a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals and other days of merriment; the Iliad he made for the men, the Odysseus for the other sex. These loose songs were not collected together into the form of an epic poem until 500 years after.”