The principal works of Homer, and, in fact, the only ones that have not been declared spurious, are the Iliad and the Odyssey. The former, as we have seen, relates some of the circumstances of the closing year of the Trojan war; and the latter tells the story of the wanderings of the Grecian prince Ulysses after the fall of Troy. The ancients, to whom the writings of Homer were so familiar, fully believed that he was the author of the two great epics attributed to him. It was left to modern critics to maintain the contrary. In 1795 Professor F. A. Wolf, of Germany, published his Prolegomena, or prefatory essay to the Iliad, in which he advanced the hypothesis that both the Iliad and the Odyssey were a collection of separate lays by different authors, for the first time reduced to writing and formed into the two great poems by the despot Pisis'tratus, of Athens, and his friends. [Footnote: Nearly all the modern German writers follow the views of Wolf against the Homeric authorship of this poem, but among the English critics there is more diversity of opinion. Colonel Mure, Mr. Gladstone, and others oppose the German view, while Grote, Professor Geddes, Professor Mahaffy and others of note adopt it, so far at least as to believe that Homer was not the sole author of the poems.] We cannot here enter into the details of the controversy to which this theory has given rise, nor can we undertake to say on which side the weight of authority is to be found. The following extracts well express the views of those who adhere to the common theory on the subject. PROFESSOR FELTON thus remarks, in the preface to his edition of the Iliad: "For my own part I prefer to consider it, as we have received it from ancient editors, as one poem--the work of one author, and that author Homer, the first and greatest of minstrels. As I understand the Iliad, there is a unity of plan, a harmony of parts, a consistency among the different situations of the same character, which mark it as the production of one mind; but of a mind as versatile as the forms of nature, the aspects of life, and the combinations of powers, propensities, and passions in man are various."