Note 49 — THE CRYSTAL PALACE.[44]

We do not presume to be critical upon the Bœotian schoolmaster’s Greek; but no modern student would take him for an authority in prosody. He says the impetuosity of the genius of Homer hurried him into a false quantity in the first line of the Iliad, in the word Θεὰ. Plutarch was forgetful of the rule of a purum in the vocative. His prejudice is sufficiently shown in his essay On the Malignity of Herodotus, whom he disliked, because the historian did not speak over favourably of the Bœotians. “Plutarch was a Bœotian, and thought it indispensably incumbent on him to vindicate the cause of his countrymen.”—Beloe’s Herod.