It was textual criticism, the deadly work of the critical scalpel in the verbal form of the poems that first destroyed the good standing of the Homeric legend. It is the revivifying work of the pickaxe and shovel in the actual ground as wielded by the excavator and archæologist that have brought back the repute of Homer. A few years ago and a Gladstone arguing for the reality of a Homer and of an Homeric epic was dismissed by the professor as an old-fashioned ignoramus. To-day almost the same terms are applied to those who cling to the fashion of yesterday and claim that the Trojan War and Homer himself are myths. In the new swing of the pendulum, however, the cautious will still avoid extremes. What has already been said about the status of Greek myth applies in the main to the Homeric poems. They are legends doubtless with some measure of historical foundation, but they cannot be accepted by the critical student of to-day as historical narratives in the narrow sense. But the Homeric poems have an interest of quite another kind which gives them a place apart among the legends of antiquity. This interest centres about the personality of the author of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. From the earliest historic periods of Grecian life the authorship of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ was unquestionably ascribed to a poet named Homer. If doubts ever arose in the mind of any sceptical or critical person as to the reality of Homer, such doubts were quite submerged by the popular verdict. It was not generally claimed that Homer himself had written the works ascribed to him,--it was long held, indeed, that he must have lived at a period prior to the introduction of writing into Greece,--but that the person whom tradition loved to speak of as the blind bard had invented and recited his narratives _in toto_, and that these, memorised by others, had been brought down through succeeding generations until they were finally given permanence in writing, were accepted as the most unequivocal of historical facts. [Illustration: HOMER]