Village books

If I am right,
as I believe I am, in holding the Odyssey to have been written by a
young woman, was ever sleeping beauty more effectually concealed
behind a more impenetrable hedge of dulness?--and she will have to
sleep a good many years yet before anyone wakes her effectually.
But what else can one expect from people, not one of whom has been
at the very slight exertion of noting a few of the writer's main
topographical indications, and then looking for them in an Admiralty
chart or two? Can any step be more obvious and easy--indeed, it is
so simple that I am ashamed of myself for not having taken it forty
years ago. Students of the Odyssey for the most part are so
engrossed with the force of the zeugma, and of the enclitic particle
[Greek]; they take so much more interest in the digamma and in the
AEolic dialect, than they do in the living spirit that sits behind
all these things and alone gives them their importance, that,
naturally enough, not caring about the personality, it remains and
always must remain invisible to them.


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