We must distinguish, however, between the credit that is due to the general tradition of Horner having been a wandering reciter of his own poetry, and the more specific facts that arc pretended to be given as the history of his life. The most ancient work of this kind is the life of Ho mer attributed to Herodotus. Whether this be the genuine production of Herodotus, we are far from pretending to decide. The opinion of Professor Heyne, which was apt to be deliberately formed, is unfavourable to its authentici ty, as lie pronounces it impossible to ascertain either the age or country of Homer. The learned Vossius also rejected its authority, on the ground that no writer makes mention of the work, previous to Stephen of Byzantium and Suidas• This argument, though it conies from a great name, is cer tainly not quite conclusive. By far the most important objec tion to it is, the different calculations of chronology exhi bited in Ilerodotus the historian of Greece, and the Hero (lotus to whom this life of Homer is assigned. The for mer, in his Euterpe, speaks of himself as posterior to Ho mer by only 400 years ; while the latter computes a period of 622 years, and the expedition of Xerxes across the Hel lespont, a difference of nearly 200 years. On this account, Eustathius wishes to assign the life of Homer to another Herodotus, surnamed Olophyscius, instead of the historian of Halicarnassus. Admitting the above objections in then
full force, it cannot he affirmed that they amount to a de monstration of the biography itself being either spurious, or fraught with internal marks of falsehood. On the con trary, the birth-place, which it gives to the author of the Iliad, corresponds with au inference most plausibly drawn by an enlightened traveller from the poet's descriptions of external nature, that he paints them with the very circum stances that would occur to a native of Chios or Smyrna If Horner was born at the latter place, the vicinity of He redolus's birth-place would naturally make him anxious to collect every tradition respecting him; and in the wandering life and disastrous voyages which those traditions describe, there is every thing which the state of society in such an age renders probable. It cannot well be doubted that the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey was a traveller, as they are both the evident offspring of a mind which had contem plated nature and human life in a full variety of aspect and manners, and of one who had felt much from the opposite dispositions of good and bad in his own species ; who, ac cording to the circumstances then existing in society, had " Walked in every path of human life, Felt all its passions, and to all mankind Doti' now, will ever, that experience yield, Which his own genius only could acquire."