acquainted with David Hume, and in 1751 published a volume of essays on the "Principles of Morality and Natural Religion," in which he set himself to oppose the opinions of that celebrated philosopher; but his advocacy of the doctrine of philosophical necessity gave great offence, and had nearly brought upon him the censures of the church. "The Art of Thinking," in 1 vol. 12mo, was published in 1761, and in the following year appeared his "Elements of Criticism," on which his reputation as an author is mainly founded. In this able and original work Lord Kames is entitled to the "merit of having given to philosophical criticism the form of a science by reducing it to general principles, methodizing its doctrines, and supporting them everywhere by the most copious and beautiful illustrations." He subsequently published the "Gentleman Farmer;" "Sketches of the History of Man," the leading doctrine of which is both irreligious and unphilosophical; and "Some Hints on Education," written in his eighty-fifth year. In addition to the important services which Lord Kames rendered to the theory and administration of law and to the literature of Scotland, he contributed greatly to the promotion of its agricultural and commercial interests, and was one of the first patrons of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He possessed extraordinary activity of mind; his intellect was powerful and acute, as well as versatile; and though ingenious and speculative to a remarkable degree, and occasionally even fanciful, he yet seldom lost sight of practical utility in his disquisitions. In private life his demeanour was characterized by frankness, good humour, and extreme vivacity. He was regarded as an able and upright judge; but he has been accused both of severity and coarseness, apparently on good grounds.—(Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Hon. Henry Home of Kames, &c., by P. F. Tytler, 2 vols. 4to.)—J. T.
HOME, John, a Scottish dramatic poet, was descended from a common ancestor with the earl of Home. His father was town-clerk of Leith, where the poet was born in 1722. He was educated first at the grammar-school of his native town, and then at the university of Edinburgh. Having chosen the clerical profession, he was licensed to preach, 4th April, 1745. Home was of an ardent and romantic disposition, and as his principles attached him strongly to the Hanoverian dynasty, he joined the corps of volunteers which was raised in Edinburgh to suppress the jacobite insurrection. He was present at the battle of Falkirk in 1746, where he was taken prisoner along with a number of student friends. He and his associates were confined for some days in Doune castle, but at length made their escape by cutting their blankets into shreds and letting themselves down over the walls. Shortly after this incident Home was presented to the church and parish of Athelstaneford in East Lothian, of which Blair, the author of the Grave, had been the previous incumbent. Home's fondness for romantic history and poetry led him to compose a tragedy on Agis, one of the heroes of Plutarch, which was offered to and rejected by Garrick in 1749. He next dramatized the beautiful old ballad of Gil Morris, and proceeded to London a second time, February, 1755, to submit his work to the great metropolitan manager, but without success. Garrick pronounced the "Tragedy of Douglas" totally unfit for the stage. The poet and his friends were dissatisfied with this verdict, and resolved to present the rejected drama upon the Edinburgh stage, 14th December, 1756. It was received with unbounded applause, and the most extravagant praise was heaped upon its author. The more serious portion of the community were deeply offended at the encouragement thus given to theatrical representations, and proceedings were taken by the church courts against both the author and his clerical friends who had been present at the representation of his play. The latter escaped with a slight censure, but Home was forced to yield to the storm and to resign his living in June, 1757. Lord Bute, however, to whom he was recommended by Archibald, duke of Argyll, soon after obtained for him the sinecure office of conservator of Scots privileges at Campvere; and on the accession of George III. in 1760, when the influence of Bute became paramount, the poet received in addition a pension of £300 a year. Home's circumstances were now independent, and in 1767 he quitted London and settled in East Lothian, where, in 1770, he married a lady of his own name. The remainder of his long and prosperous life was spent very happily among a circle of eminent literary friends, including David Hume, Adam Smith, and Principal Robertson, of whose ecclesiastical policy Home was an early and most zealous supporter. He wrote other three tragedies, the "Fatal Discovery," "Alonzo," and "Alfred," which were received at first with considerable applause, but speedily fell into oblivion. His last work, a "History of the Rebellion in 1745," was published in 1802, and is of very little value; but the author's intellect had by this time been weakened by a fall from his horse. Home died in 1808, in his eighty-sixth year. His friend Dr. Carlyle, in his amusing Autobiography, has drawn a vivid picture of John Home's sprightliness and vivacity, his amiable and benevolent disposition, his strong prejudices, and harmless vanity. He was the ready and liberal patron of poor and neglected merit, and not a few who have risen to wealth and fame owed their first rise in life to his helping hand. Home's poetical talents were not of a very high order; but his "Douglas"—the only one of his tragedies which has not sunk into oblivion—contains many passages of great beauty, and the language throughout is chaste and polished, and sometimes even elegant.—J. T.
HOMER, though one of the most notable names in the whole history of literature, is not one that, in a strictly biographical dictionary, can occupy a large space; for living as he did at least four hundred years before the first accredited historical work in the Greek language, there exists with regard to him little more than the great fact of a great name, looming largely in the dim distance of oral tradition. He is to us in fact, as he was to the ancient Greeks, scarcely anything more than the keystone by which the grand arch of his poetry is bound together; only a little less misty than Ossian, somewhat as the Greek mountains wave more clear than the Scotch ones. But even this small superiority in point of tangibility and distinctness has been studiously denied him by a whole host of erudite and subtle commentators in Germany, who have not been without their representatives in this country. Mr. Grote in particular, the talented historian of Greece, has gone the whole length of ultra-German scepticism on this subject, and professes his total disbelief in the man Homer as a historical personage. It is necessary therefore to expose, in a few words, the unreasonableness of this scepticism, before stating the very few facts of historical significance that are attached to the name of Homer. The tendency to deny altogether the historical reality of this great poet, first became notable in literary history about the end of the last century, when Frederick Augustus Wolf, a learned and ingenious professor at Halle in Saxony, published a new edition of the works of Homer, accompanied by prolegomena, in which he maintained that the Iliad was not a great organic epos, as generally believed, the product of one great poetic genius, but a mere aggregate of popular ballads by various bards, put together by some literary man about the time of Pisistratus. The origin of this theory lay deeper, in an innate tendency of the German mind to derive every thing from ideas, and to see in the solid tradition of past times only symbols, and types, and allegories of abstract ideas. This tendency has manifested itself during the last sixty or seventy years, in a series of the most pretentious and portentous negations of all that had previously been admitted as recorded fact—accompanied with an attempted substitution for these facts of the most brilliant and baseless imaginations. The sceptical element of this characteristically German movement has, no doubt, been of great service to historical research, in so far as it has led inquirers to sift existing evidence more nicely, and to be more discriminate in their belief of testimony; but the substitution on a large scale of unsubstantial signs and symbols for the reality which is the kernel of all human tradition, has led to a vast amount of ingenious nonsense and unprofitable conjecture in the form of criticism. Of this evil, by which their literature has been infected to an almost incredible extent, the Germans themselves are now becoming sensible; and some of their greatest names in classical criticism, as Welcker, Müller, and Kitsch, have reverted to the salutary old belief in the historical validity of the man Homer. This belief may, indeed, now be considered as established firmly, both on the general nature of all human tradition, which is wont to grow out of fact, not fancies, and on the special character of the Homeric poems, which, after all the cruel sifting to which they have been subjected, present as undeniably the traces of a great creative mind as the admitted epic masterpieces of a Virgil, a Tasso, and a Milton. With regard to the Odyssey, indeed, the evidences of a continuous and well-constructed plan are so obvious, that no serious attempt has been made, as in the case of the Iliad, to resolve
