Egyptian Dynasties, for example.  And here is a point to remember:  alphabets are invented; systems of writing are lost and reintroduced; but it is idle to talk of the invention of writing.  Humanity has been writing, in one way or another, since Lemurian days.  When the Manasaputra incarnated, Man became a poetizing animal; and before the Fourth Race began, his divine Teachers had taught him to set his poems down on whatever he chanced at the time to be using as we use paper.

Now, what more can we learn about the inner and real Homer?  What can I tell you in the way of literary criticism, to fill out the picture I have attempted to make?  Very little; yet perhaps something.  I think his historical importance is greater, for us now, than his literary importance.  I doubt you shall find in him as great and true thinking, as much Theosophy or Light upon the hidden things, as there is in Virgil for example.  I doubt he was an initiate, to understand in that life and with his conscious mind the truths that make men free.  Plato did not altogether approve of him; and where Plato dared lead, we others need not fear to follow.  I think the great Master-Poets of the world have been such because, with supreme insight into the hidden, they presented a great Master-Symbol of the Human Soul.  I believe that in the Iliad Homer gives us nothing of that sort; and that therefore, in a certain sense, he is constantly over-rated.  He pays the penalty of his over-whelming reputation:  his fame is chiefly in the mouths of those who know him not at all, and use their hats for speaking-trumpets.  We have in English no approximately decent translation of him.  Someone said that Pope served him as Puck served Bully Bottom, what time Peter Quince was moved to cry:  “Bless thee Bottom, how thou art translated!” It is not so; to call Pope an ass would be to wrong a faithful and patient quadruped; than which Pope was as much greater in intellect as he was less in all qualities that call for true respect.  Yet often we applaud Homer, only upon a knowledge of Pope; and it is safe to say that if you love Pope you would loathe Homer.  Pope held that water should manifest, so to say, through Kew or Versailles fountains; but it was essentially to be from the Kitchen-tap—­or even from the sewer.  Homer was more familiar with it thundering on the precipices, or lisping on the yellow sands of time-forgotten Mediterranean islands.  Which pronunciation do you prefer for his often-recurring and famous sea-epithet:  the thunder-on-the-precipices of

     poluphloisboio thalasses,

or the lisping-on-the-sands of

    _ poluphleesbeeo thalassace?_

(pardon the attempted phonetics).—­For truly there are advocates of either; but neither I suppose would have appealed much to Mr. Pope.