had been raised. Mure,[3] the last and perhaps most distinguished of British writers on this subject, has left the debate in such a state that those who follow him may be excused, and may excuse their readers, from systematic preliminary discussion; and may proceed upon the assumption that the Iliad and Odyssey are in their substance the true offspring of the heroic age itself, and are genuine gifts not only of a remote antiquity but of a designing mind; as well as that he, to whom that mind belonged, has been justly declared by the verdict of all ages to be the patriarch of poets. These controversies have been ‘bolted to the bran;’ for us at least they are all but dead, and to me it seems little better than lost time to revive them. Having then at the present day the title to the estate in some degree secured from litigation, we may enter upon the fruition of it, and with all the truer zest on account of the conflict, which has been long and keenly fought, and in the general opinion fairly won. It now becomes all those, who love Homer, to prosecute the sure method of inquiry and appreciation by close, continued, comprehensive study of the text; a study of which it would be easy to prove the need, by showing how inaccurately the poems are often cited in quarters, to which the general reader justifiably looks for trustworthy information. To this we have been exhorted by the writer already named:[4] and we have only to make his practice our model. That something has already been attained, we may judge by comparison. Let us take a single instance. In the year 1735 was published ‘Blackwell’s Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer.’ Bentley, as it would appear from Bishop Monk’s Life[5] of that extraordinary scholar, was not to be taken in by a book of this kind: but such men as Bentley are not samples of their time, they are living symbols and predictions of what it will require years or generations to accomplish. We may rather judge of the common impression made by this book, from the Notes to Pope’s Preface to the Iliad, where Warton[6] extols it as ‘a work that abounds in curious researches and observations, and places Homer in a new light.’ But no reader of Homer, in our own time, would really, I apprehend, be the poorer, if every copy of it could be burned.