Let us cast our eyes on antiquity. This very much misunderstood period of the earth's progress offers to us the proofs of an appreciation of Homer to which literary history affords but one parallel. The magnificent flights of thought, which the Hellenes could so well accompany, the tone of colouring at once so subdued and so glorious, gained for the unknown poet a reputation everlasting and world and age-wide. But as time fled by, there arose a race of men who wrote poetry as schoolboys do Latin, by judiciously arranging (or _vice versâ_) appropriate lines from the earlier poets, called Cyclic poets, or _cento_-makers. The men who wrote thus were, probably, persons either engaged in itinerant vocal pursuits, or regular verse makers, who wrote "on a subject," as our own street writers on the present day. Indeed, I may say, that the state of the rhapsodists of Greece resembles much that of our own "itinerant violinists," as an eminent counsel once apostrophized the class which the excellent judge on the bench named, according to general custom, "blin' fiddlers." The probable reason for the introduction of passages into the original Homeric compositions was the necessity of a novelty. The Cyclic poems are to Homer what the letters of Poplicola, Anti-Sejanus, Correggio, Moderator, and the rest, were to Junius. However, they prove in a remarkable manner how great the excitement regarding "the poet," as Aristoteles calls him, ever continued to be in Hellas. These gentlemen, whose object was not to disgrace Homer by their puling compositions, but only to practically observe the maxims subsequently instilled by Iago into Roderigo's mind (viz., to "put money in their purse"), were the precursors of another race of writers. In ancient times, we are informed by Tatian[1], there were many writers on Homer, whose works, it is to be lamented, have perished with the nominal exception of a few fragments,--though, perhaps, scholars will once learn to use those as a clue, and find, as Burges did in the case of Thucydides[2], that many valuable passages are lying hid in the pages of the lexicographers, who spared themselves the trouble of writing fresh matter, by merely slightly changing the expressions of their sources, and not "bothering" their lexicographical brains by attempting original composition. It is thus, that even the weaknesses of the human mind benefit after ages! [Footnote 1: Fabr. _Bibl. Græc._ II. 1. iii.] [Footnote 2: _Journ. of the Royal Soc. of Literature_, vol, ii., New Series, and afterwards in a pamphlet in 1845.]