not listening"; but, in spite of the devotion exhibited here, the
love-business in the Odyssey is artificial and described by one who
had never felt it, whereas in the Iliad it is spontaneous and
obviously genuine, as by one who knows all about it perfectly well.
The love-business in fact of the Odyssey is turned on as we turn on
the gas--when we cannot get on without it, but not otherwise.

A fascinating brilliant girl, who naturally adopts for her patroness
the blue-stocking Minerva; a man-hatress, as clever girls so often
are, and determined to pay the author of the Iliad out for his
treatment of her sex by insisting on its superior moral, not to say
intellectual, capacity, and on the self-sufficient imbecility of man
unless he has a woman always at his elbow to keep him tolerably
straight and in his proper place--this, and not the musty fusty old
bust we see in libraries, is the kind of person who I believe wrote
the Odyssey. Of course in reality the work must be written by a
man, because they say so at Oxford and Cambridge, and they know
everything down in Oxford and Cambridge; but I venture to say that
if the Odyssey were to appear anonymously for the first time now,
and to be sent round to the papers for review, there is not even a
professional critic who would not see that it is a woman's writing
and not a man's. But letting this pass, I can hardly doubt, for
reasons which I gave in yesterday's Athenaeum, and for others that I
cannot now insist upon, that the poem was written by a native of
Trapani on the coast of Sicily, near Marsala. Fancy what the
position of a young, ardent, brilliant woman must have been in a
small Sicilian sea-port, say some eight or nine hundred years before
the birth of Christ. It makes one shudder to think of it. Night
after night she hears the dreary blind old bard Demodocus drawl out
his interminable recitals taken from our present Iliad, or from some