Village books

" Besides showing
that the Odyssey was written by a woman in Sicily and translating
the poem into English prose, he also translated the Iliad, and, in
March, 1895, went to Greece and the Troad to see the country therein
described, where he found nothing to cause him to disagree with the
received theories.
It has been said of him in a general way that the fact of an opinion
being commonly held was enough to make him profess the opposite. It
was enough to make him examine the opinion for himself, when it
affected any of the many subjects which interested him, and if,
after giving it his best attention, he found it did not hold water,
then no weight of authority could make him say that it did. This
matter of the geography of the Iliad is only one among many commonly
received opinions which he examined for himself and found no reason
to dispute; on these he considered it unnecessary to write.
It is characteristic of his passion for doing things thoroughly that
he learnt nearly the whole of the Odyssey and the Iliad by heart.


Pages:
55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79