made by Pizzetta in Varallo in 1889. Emery Walker Ltd., ph. sc.
butler.jpg]

"The Humour of Homer" was originally delivered as a lecture at the
Working Men's College in Great Ormond Street on the 30th January,
1892, the day on which Butler first promulgated his theory of the
Trapanese origin of the Odyssey in a letter to the Athenaeum. Later
in the same year it was published with some additional matter by
Messrs. Metcalfe and Co. of Cambridge. For the next five years
Butler was engaged upon researches into the origin and authorship of
the Odyssey, the results of which are embodied in his book The
Authoress of the "Odyssey," originally published by Messrs. Longman
in 1897. Butler incorporated a good deal of "The Humour of Homer"
into The Authoress of the "Odyssey," but the section relating to the
Iliad naturally found no place in the later work. For the sake of
this alone "The Humour of Homer" deserves to be better known.
Written as it was for an artisan audience and professing to deal
only with one side of Homer's genius, "The Humour of Homer" must
not, of course, be taken as an exhaustive statement of Butler's
views upon Homeric questions. It touches but lightly on important
points, particularly regarding the origin and authorship of the
Odyssey, which are treated at much greater length in The Authoress
of the "Odyssey."

Nevertheless, "The Humour of Homer" appears to me to have a special
value as a kind of general introduction to Butler's more detailed
study of the Odyssey. His attitude towards the Homeric poems is
here expressed with extraordinary freshness and force. What that
attitude was is best explained by his own words: "If a person would
understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must