The history of literature, from the earliest times, has recorded singular instances of imposture and unacknowledged plagiarism; in many of which, the talent necessary to design, as well as the perseverance to develope, the proposed fraud, were worthy of a better direction. In the opinion of the learned critic, Dr. Bentley, the practice of writing spurious books is almost as old as letters themselves; but that it chiefly prevailed when the kings of Pergamus and Alexandria, rivalling one another in the magnificence and copiousness of their libraries, gave great prices for treatises that had the names of celebrated authors attached to them. Modern critics have, with much learned ingenuity, reasoned upon the possibilities and probabilities of the celebrated poems of the Iliad and Odyssey not being the performance of one man. Though, at this distance of time, the question must be settled rather by individual conviction, than received as a decided point in the history of literature; yet still it may not be uninteresting to state the arguments which have been brought forward against the authenticity of Homer’s poems, or rather against the existence of Homer himself. Fabricius has collected a number of fragments and accounts of authors who have been supposed more ancient than Homer; most of these, however, have been regarded by the learned as forgeries, originating in the love of gain, and encouraged by the credulity of the Greeks. It has been maintained that neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey is the work of a single mind, but a collection of the songs of the wandering rhapsodists, as they were called, and, for the first time, completely arranged at Athens under the inspection of Pisistratus, or his son. Pisistratus is mentioned by Ælian as the compiler of the Iliad and the Odyssey. This theory reduces Homer to a name merely; or, at best, as only one bard more celebrated than the rest, or, perhaps, as nothing more than a successful reciter. This idea respecting the authenticity of the above poems, was again started, about the close of the seventeenth century, by Perrault and others, but was received with derision by the learned world. More recently, it has been again advocated, with great learning, by Heyne; and, with wonderful acuteness, by Professor Wolf, of Berlin. It appears from the best accounts, that these poems, said to be the production of Homer, were first brought into Greece by Lycurgus; who had heard them in the course of his travels among the Chians, by means of the recitation of their rhapsodists; nor were they then in that perfect form in which they were afterwards presented by Pisistratus, to whom the credit of the arrangement appears to have been generally given by Cicero and others.