"
As to the historic aims of Homer, Mr. Gladstone says: "Where other poets
sketch, Homer draws; and where they draw he carves. He alone of all the
now famous epic writers, moves (in the 'Iliad' especially) subject to
the stricter laws of time and place; he alone, while producing an
unsurpassed work of the imagination, is also the greatest chronicler
that ever lived, and presents to us, from his own single hand, a
representation of life, manners, history, of morals, theology, and
politics, so vivid and comprehensive, that it may be hard to say whether
any of the more refined ages of Greece or Rome, with their clouds of
authors and their multiplied forms of historical record, are either more
faithfully or more completely conveyed to us."
Mr. Gladstone fixes the probable date of Homer within a generation or
two of the Trojan war, assigning as his principal reason for so doing
the poet's visible identity with the age, the altering but not yet
vanishing age of which he sings, and the broad interval in tone and
feeling between himself and the very nearest of all that follow him. He
presents several arguments to prove the trustworthiness of the text
of Homer.
In 1877, Mr. Gladstone wrote an article on the "Dominions of the
Odysseus," and also wrote a preface to Dr.
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