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