SOURCE: "Homer and the Homeridae," in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, edited by David Masson, A. & C. Black, 1897, pp. 7-95.

An English critic and essayist, De Quincey used his own life as the subject of his best-known work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822), in which he chronicled his addiction to opium. He contributed reviews to a number of London journals and earned a reputation as an insightful if occasionally long-winded literary critic. At the time of his death, De Quincey's critical expertise was underestimated, though his talent as a prose writer had long been acknowledged. In the following excerpt from an article first published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1841, De Quincey studies the historical background of Homeric texts.

Up to … (the epoch of transplanting the Iliad from Greece insular and Greece colonial to Greece continental) the Homeric poems had been left to the custo-dy of two...