power of selecting phases of action and character that one most abiding source of his power over the mind of his audience, and influence over the universal mind of man consists. This power was in him very largely developed; but it is an attribute of all the greatest minds; and the difference of our sentiments respecting persons or things, which equally have the equivocal merit of age on their side, does not arise only from the absolute beauty or excellence of the one class, but also its relative utility to us, as furnishing materials of history, and illustrative of a nationality. The footsteps of a great writer are all forwards; of a little one, backwards. It may be curious to trace the Greek of the era of Pericles and Demosthenes back to the Boeotian of Hesiod; we should find it impossible from the latter to foreshadow the former. In Homer, on the contrary, we see the present ready to burst into the future, so that the whole of Greek literature seems to have a direct lineal connection with him, as the multitudinous arbours of the Indian fig-tree with the one parent stem.

In the characters depicted there is a yet plainer resemblance to those of later times than in the external form of the literature of the two periods. Proceeding upwards with the progress of the nation, in the great intellectual powers, nay, the great qualities of the golden age of Athens, when the very vices seem "weeds of glorious growth," though vices, and in their tendencies debasing ones, they surely were, sometimes clearly, sometimes dimly we can detect the same nature, developed neither as to its vices nor as to its virtues, but in itself, and implicitly, as full and branching as at an earlier period. The political sagacity of Ulysses is seen, maturer, but with colder moral aspect, to actuate the counsels of Themistocles; and the caprice of Achilles, the Fate of his people, stirs under the more baneful phase, and with a far less generous heart, in the actions of Alcibiades.

It is hardly worth while attempting seriously to prove, after Mr Gladstone, how it is all but a duty and necessity for men deeply interested in any nation to use all materials in their power for interpreting the national type by the light of its earlier stages. Could we, indeed, sufficiently realise the relationship between Homeric and later Greece in spirit and tone of feeling, as tested by its equally distinct unlikeness to that of the surrounding kingdoms at both times, we should not have failed, as Mr Gladstone accuses us of having done, in approximating to that degree of ardour and earnestness in studying the poet which is his rightful due. Mr Gladstone, however, hardly puts the obligation on this footing. He seems to us, in his zeal for his favourite author, to defeat his own end, and to be cutting himself off from the sympathy of that large body of enthusiastic admirers

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of the more clearly historical epochs, who might study the Iliad and Odyssey as links in the great chain of Hellenic progress, but would not care for a bard so elevated above his successors as to have no common ground with them. To this point we shall have occasion to recur. At present, we can travel on willingly with Mr Gladstone, so long as he is employed in demonstrating the credibility of Homer as the delineator of an age.

The chief argument for his truthfulness, and, to a certain extent, an unanswerable one, is the impossibility of plausible untruthfulness before the epoch of book-learning or ultra-civilisation. The "Castle of Otranto," or the "Mysteries of Udolph," produced by an Englishman in the Middle Ages, would have been marvels indeed. The master of all poets was not elevated above his race and time in experience or information, but only in the quality of his mind. Divine Achilles was dependent upon material armour, equally with that most terrestrial of heroes, giant Ajax ; but what was base hide or iron for the one, was pictured silver and red gold in the shield of the son of a goddess. It was fortunate that his contemporaries were of the noblest type among races, at least of the type most poetical. But this was his happy lot, not his choice. He could only see what was before his eye, and he must have painted it, whatever it had been. Thus, as he could not but mean to represent the period, displaying as it did lines and traits so fine as perforce to attract an eye so keen for poetic beauty as his, so it could not but be that he accomplished his intent; for nowhere else could he, thus isolated in a narrow island of intellectual and moral refinement from the neighbouring "Barbaria," have found such material for his photographs of heroic energy in action, and fire in passion, as in his own Greeks. There was no necessity, so to speak, for a surpassing poet to have sprung up in that age; but, when such a mind was formed and nurtured, fidelity was a thing of course. He might have idealised the rude vigour of a William the Conqueror into an imperial Agamemnon; he could never have wrought even an Ajax out of a nation of such Achilles' as we have in "Troilus and Cressida."

The proof that fidelity has been preserved, both in the ordinary facts of every-day life and manners, and also in the great extraordinary facts of national life, is, as such proof always must be, internal. But, besides the evidence thus afforded us, the burden of proof lies on the opponents of such a theory. It is for them to show how, in the absence of historians, and even of chroniclers to spoil for his Muse the incidents of actual war and adventure, it was possible, not to say probable, for the bard to pass by such obvious sources of interest to his audience. Till a learned class, like the monastic bodies of the Middle Ages, arises

in a primitive people, its records of fact are properly in the keeping of its minstrels. Lastly, it is for these same sceptics to explain why the fervent imaginative poet should have been so minute and matter-of-fact, not once or twice to please a patron, but everywhere, as though to please and ward off historical critics, unless from the circumstance that he was truly an historian, and therefore liable to fulfil all the laws of that art, as well as of that which we are accustomed to consider more peculiarly his own.

So thickly up and down the poem are evidences scattered, that, at all events, whatever may have been the poet's own convictions, he meant his hearers to believe in it as a record of the real acts of real men, that we can comprehend Mr Gladstone's surprise that there should have been at any time disbelief in the existence of the historical element in, at least, the Iliad. The question is not so free from doubt as to the nature of this historical credibility in the poet,-whether, that is, it arise from an effort of his will and deliberate intention, or be spontaneous, that is, the effect of the colours of life being those nearest at hand. We cannot accurately determine how far Mr Gladstone's belief in the literal credibility of Homer extends; but he appears to wish to establish in this, as in other respects, a difference between him and others in kind, not only in degree. A theory which requires such a concession appears rather forced. If the poet indeed flourished, as is most generally supposed, when the heroic age had now passed away, he might well have striven, according to Keble's fine hypothesis, to recall the dying echoes of an era which he regretted for its energy and enthusiasm. The glow of its manliness, and abundance of life, would be still living in the memory of the aged, softened and deepened by the contrast with the existing state of things. This is what Homer would see and describe; the uncouthness and ugly traits of a spirit of violence he would not care to be reminded of. In fact, even had it been in his power to give the true scenes of that primeval life, it is doubtful whether an audience in the fresh vigour of revolutionary change would have been yet far enough off, or sufficiently accustomed to, and tired of the routine of their own condition, to call for reproduction of the state of things, in all its features, which they had so lately dispossessed. If, on the other hand, his epoch was really the heroic age itself, his very proximity in time would have tended to seal up for him the War of Troy. He could not, perhaps, in a martial age and amongst a warrior people, have strung his harp to the pursuits of peace or praises of heroes who never existed; but experience shows us he could, though with the trophies of victories, won by his host's forefathers, hanging over his head, neglect the actual achievement of the con

a

The Present too Prosaic for an Epic.

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quest of Asia for fabulous tales of real but bygone kings, whose adventures had preoccupied the national fancy. It is by no means evident that men care to have their contemporaries made the heroes of a song. There is too much of the trite and common-place, it is supposed, in modern society, to allow us to relish even the picture of Marlborough in the lineaments of a mythological hero: is it quite certain that those earlier times are utterly devoid of their own especial form of the prosaic, and that the denizens of the time are not as perfectly alive to, and as morbidly conscious of its anti-poetical traits? If Achilles, living and fighting and dying before Troy, had been daguerreotyped by the poet, would he have appeared to his descendants the ideal of the great heroic type which he did to the Athens of Pericles? Themistocles did not strike his fellow-citizens as being their Ulysses; and even the story of those heroic Persian wars, infinitely nobler in origin, progress, and results than the raid of Hellas upon Troy, as Homer explains it, is reduced in the description from the pen of the most Homeric and tragic of later poets, himself an actor in the scene, to the jejune narrative of a Gazette. Whose deeds were celebrated in the court of the Queen of England in our most heroic era! It was not those of her Drakes and Raleighs; the Armada itself did not call forth one song worthy to take its place with the Arcadian Idyls and catastrophes of knights-errant, which were the favoured themes. The people of Richard II. did not listen to lays of Cressy and Poictiers, but were willingly transported by Chaucer, our Homer, to Thebes or Lombardy. Rufus, among his victorious Norman barons, did not delight in eulogies of Rollo's wild adventures, or the more recent glories of the Conqueror, but was soothed by the alien legends of Charlemagne's fabulous Peers. Even the sorrowful battle of Hastings itself was not remembered in a single worthy ballad by a race which was ever bewailing it.

Only after a long period of probation, and when a great part of the truly historical has been filtered away, the train of events rises into men's ken as at once real poetry and real history. Our knowledge of the great Frank Emperor is not derived merely from the Norman and French romancers. Their hearers were

to the full as convinced of his existence and prowess as we; but the details of it were, in their legends, very different to those we have gathered for ourselves from his Edicts and Capitularies. So, although we have not in this case been able to procure an independent account, the other great historical tradition of the dark ages, the deeds of King Arthur, and the Round Table, grew to be implicitly believed in as a true narrative, long after the time for testing the details had disappeared. The belief of Greece in the veracity of Homer is no more a proof of that

veracity, so far as particulars go, than the corresponding confidence of Welch, and Saxons, and Normans in the Chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth, forces us to sympathise with their credulity. Nor, again, judging from the same examples, does the uniformity of the reliance by the Greek mind upon the Iliad, and the statements therein made of the fortunes of its heroes, as the basis of its history, while the testimony of the Cyclic poets was to a great degree neglected, demonstrate the truth of the former, any more than does the consistent adherence of our own ancestors, and of French and Germans, to Archbishop Turpin and Geoffrey, to the exclusion of narratives equally plausible, prove the fidelity of their annals. Nations in the earlier stages of their development, perhaps also in the later, appear to be the captives of the first coiner of legends pretending to be national. Their sway, once fixed, is never thrown off; it grows with the nation's growth; and the most that subsequent efforts of imagination or traditions of true events can hope for, is to get engrafted upon this primary stock. Modern times are as much in bondage as the ancient to the seeming accident of having been preoccupied, when in the stage fitted for receiving new impressions, by some special legend or character. Even now, Englishmen's minds recur to King Arthur and King Alfred as their national tutelary heroes, as naturally as a Scotchman's to William Wallace and Bruce. So Napoleon, when he could have modelled France at his pleasure, chose for the type, not the recollections of the magnificence of Louis XIV., the bonhommie of Henri IV., or the chivalrous piety of Louis IX., but the legends of the semi-French house of Pepin, and the crown and triumphs of Charlemagne.

We are liable to be deceived, by the far greater verisimilitude of the Homeric narrative, into assigning to it an altogether different historical position to these national epics of the Middle Ages. Whatever the Greek intellect took hold of, it at once. idealised and rationalised. The Læstrygonians and Cyclops became possible beings in a possible though unrealised state of existence.

Homer's genius is not satisfied with the stage properties, as it were, of an epoch. His poems have, over and above all this, a general air of truth. The whole scene is the ideal of one side of Greek life, ranged against the other and more Pelasgic aspect of Græcism as mingled with the Asiatic, but not Asiatic-in fact, as toned down and perhaps deteriorated in the colonies of Ionia and Eolia. Both aspects came within the range of the poet's personal experience; and into this nursery he transplanted the shoots and scions of a different age, but yet one so closely related to his that their products took root at once in the new soil. Achilles,