The courteous reader, whom we beg also to suppose the most ignorant of readers, by way of thus founding a necessity and a case of philosophic reasonableness for the circumstantiality of our own explanations, will be pleased to understand that by ancient traditionary usage the word _rhapsodia_ is the designation technically applied to the several books or cantos of the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey.' So the word _fytte_ has gained a technical appropriation to our narrative poetry when it takes the ballad form. Now, the Greek word _rhapsody_ is derived from a tense of the verb _rhapto_, to sew as with a needle, to connect, and _ode_, a song, chant, or course of singing. If, therefore, you conceive of a _rhapsodia_, not as the _opera_, but as the _opus_ of a singer, not as the form, but as the result of his official ministration, viz., as that section of a narrative poem which forms an intelligible whole in itself, whilst in a subordinate relation it is one part of a larger whole--this idea represents accurately enough the use of the word _rhapsodia_ in the latter periods of Greek literature. Suppose the word _canto_ to be taken in its literal etymological sense, it would indicate a metrical composition meant to be sung or chanted. But what constitutes the complexity of the idea in the word _rhapsodia_ is that both its separate elements, the poetry and the musical delivery, are equally essential; neither is a casual, neither a subordinate, element. Now, the 'Rhapsodoi,' as may be supposed, are the personal correlates of the _rhapsodia._ This being the poem adapted to chanting, those were the chanters. And the only important question which we can imagine to arise is, How far in any given age we may presume the functions of the poetical composer and the musical deliverer to have been united. We cannot perceive that any possible relation between a rhapsody considered as a section of a poem and the whole of that poem, or any possible relation which this same rhapsody considered as a thing to be sung or accompanied instrumentally could bear to the naked-speaking rehearsal of the same poem or to the original text of that poem, ever can affect the main question of Homer's integrity. The 'Rhapsodoi' come to be mentioned at all simply as being one link in the transmission of the Homeric poems. They are found existing before Pisistratus, they are found existing after Pisistratus. And they declined exactly as the art of reading became general. We can approximate pretty closely to the time when the 'Rhapsodoi' ceased; but at what time they began we defy any man to say. Plato (Rep. x.) represents them as going back into the days of Homer; nay, according to Plato, Homer himself was a _rhapsodos_, and itinerated in that character. So was Hesiod. And two remarkable lines, ascribed to Hesiod by one of the Scholiasts upon Pindar, if we could be sure that they were genuine, settle that question: