In the Homeric poems a somewhat vague tradition seems to come down of the achievements of one of the European peoples in that ancient cycle.  Sometime then Greece had her last Pre-periclean age of greatness.  What form it took, the details of it, were probably as much lost to the historic Greeks as the details of the Celtic Age are to us.  But Homer caught an echo and preserved the atmosphere of it.  As the Celtic Age bequeaths to us, in the Irish and Welsh stories, a sense of style—­which thing is the impress of the human spirit triumphant over all hindrances to its expression;—­so that long past period bequeathed through Homer a sense of style to the later Greeks.  It rings majestically through his lines.  His history is perhaps not actual history in any recognizable shape.

Legends of a long lost glory drifted down to a poet of mightiest genius; and he embodied them, amplified them, told his message through them; perhaps reinvented half of them.  Even so Geoffrey of Monmouth (without genius, however) did with the rumors that came down to him anent the ancient story of his own people; and Spenser followed him in the Faery Queen, Malory in his book, and Tennyson in the Idylls of the King. Even in that last, from the one poem Morte D’Arthur we should get a sense of the old stylish magnificence of the Celtic epoch; for the sake of a score of lines in it, we can forgive Tennyson the rest of the Idylls.  But Tennyson was no Celt himself; only, like Spenser and Malory, an anglicizer of things Celtic.  How much more of the true spirit would have come down to Homer, a Greek of genius, writing of traditional Greek glory, and thrilled with racial uplift.

Where did he live?  Oh, Goodness knows!  When?  Goodness knows again. (Though we others may guess a little, I hope.) We have Herodotus for it, that Homer lived about four hundred years before his own time; that is to say, to give a date, in 850; and I like the figure well; for if Dante came in as soon as possible after the opening of this present manvantara, why not Homer as soon as possible after the opening of the last one?  At such times great souls do come in; or a little before or a little after; because they have a work of preparation to do; and between Dante and Homer there is much parallelism in aims and aspirations:  what the one sought to do for Italy, the other sought to do for Greece.  But this is to treat Homer as if he had been one real man; whereas everybody knows ‘it has been proved’ (a) that there was no such person; (b) that there were dozens of him; (c) that black is white, man an ape, and the soul a fiction.  Admitted.  A school of critics has cleaned poor old blind Maeonides up very tidily, and left not a vestige of him on God’s earth—­just as they have, or their like have, cleaned up the Human Soul.  But there is another school, who have preserved for him some shreds at least of identity.  Briefly put, you can ’prove up what may be classed as brain-mind evidence—­grammar,