Works and days.

96 S. In very good condition. - Introduction: THE PLACE OF THE WORKS AND DAYS IN LITERATURE -- THE task of assigning a literary position to the Works and Days is attended by two chief difficulties. We have difficulty in finding satisfactory canons of criticism by which to appraise a poem of this kind, and we are hampered by doubts which have been expressed concerning the authorship of this or that part of the work. The latter of those two difficulties really arises out of the former, and is largely the creation of those critics who, failing to find an answer to the first question, avoided it by discussing the second. Hence the more important point has been a good deal neglected, while we have a wearisome list of solutions for the other. The poem has been cut up into sections and labelled separate poems. Others excise numerous passages as interpolations, leaving a miserable remnant from which the poem is said to have " grown." It is not proposed here to discuss the rival merits of these dissections, 1 still less to add another to the list; but the question of the composition of the Works and Days has so often been treated in this manner that the reader may consider that there must have been some reason for it and ask what are the arguments in favour of dissection.