that which at first appears to run parallel with virtue— and the strongest minds have been found unable to check themselves mid-career in a downward course, when the weakest might have stood firm at the outset.

Our limits forbid our pushing the inquiry to the extent it admits. The more, however, we consider it, the more we are persuaded of the ill consequences of repealing this law, that it would afford opportunity to the unprincipled, be fraught with peril to the weak, and, through the misconduct of some, render the position of all open to surmise, uneasy and equivocal.

T. E. COUR.

VI.

ON THE HOMERIC POEMS.*

[MAY, 1850.]

HOUGHT is imperishable. High matter this. for reflection, if rightly considered, but otherwise very apt to lead to what seems endowed

with almost equal vitality—error; for it is not every collocation of letters, nor grouping them into words and sentences, that is to be dignified with that appellation. These are the trappings, the husk, the body, if you will, galvanically susceptible of motion, though the soul, the thought, be clean out of them. Nor again, when we speak of the indestructibility of thought, must we confound thought with the form it is clothed in, the body which enshrines it. The words, in which thought finds utterance, wax old, and wither, and drop out of men's remembrance, while the thought itself, which was the life of them, seeking

"Thoughts on the Homeric Poems and British Ballads. No. 2 of The People's Classical Library. Sherwood, Paternoster Row."

fresh combinations, lives on through a long course of intellectual metempsychosis, so to speak, ages without end. It is with the offspring of man's mind, as with himself, the imperishable or soul-part of it withdraws not the other from the law of its being, gradual decay. The Enochs and Elijahs of his race, that are bodily translated beyond reach of dissolution, be but few: few also are the instances in which thought is found to communicate its immortality to the form in which it first walked this world of ours.

Among these few, three names stand out conspicuous, Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. Like beacon-towers, they fling their broad light across the weltering waves of time, that restless rage around, other things devouring, but beating in vain against these, that stand scatheless as at the first. To their winged thoughts, in the very words they first found utterance, men to this hour listen entranced, and will scarce brook to hear them in any other. For with all three, with our many-minded man, with the stern Florentine, and the more joyous, large-souled Greek, it is the same. Their thoughts have an utterance all their own; a music, that any the slightest change must mar, though too robust withal, even under the roughest handling, to show other than pre-eminently beautiful and great. Conspicuous, too, in all three, is that inseparable mark of genius of the first order, throwing off its great works, as bright emanations, without any apparent effort. Nor is this shown in the mere ordering or conduct only of their great poems, or in their affluence of thought and imagery, but conspicuously in the language also, which, though it be of words that burn, is always natural, easy, idiomatic; the right word in the right place; and seeming to rise so spontaneously from the subject, that the reader is wont to fancy that, had the thought been his, he could not but have fallen into the same expression.

But this power of performing great things with apparent ease, be it observed, by way of caution to our younger readers, does not imply that they could be achieved without labour somewhere. Such facility is not given but to minds of gigantic strength and proportions, and even to those only as the fruit of much labour, and efforts manifold previously undergone, of which, this, their crowning achievement in each case, may be considered the expression. Their performance is before us, but not their training. With their earliest essays we are unacquainted. We see the eagle in his pride of place, and careering at will, on indefatigable wings; but saw him not when thrust from the nest, with untried pinions, in his first wrestlings with the vernal breeze,

Plunge in the sea where you will, it is everywhere salt. Take these great poets where you will, though they may vary in tone and colour, they everywhere savour of themselves. Whether he stoop or rise, Shakespeare is always Shakespeare, and Dante still himself, and Homer is Homer throughout. Illustration, however, is often more impressive than precept. Take the last of these at random. The Iliad is before us, lying open at the third book. Observe of this book, how naturally it grows out of the incidents of the preceding. The hostile armies in face of each other, the beautiful episode of the single combat of Paris and Menelaus, with the circumstances attending it, including Helen's description of the various chiefs that Priam asks her about (one of the sweetest incidents by the way, and most picturesque of the kind to be met with anywhere), are all made to succeed each other in the most natural way possible. And here it behoves young poets to take especial note that there is nothing forced, nothing

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arbitrary about Homer: everything arises as of itself, nothing lugged in. They, therefore, if ever tempted to stick incidents in, whereby, as on pegs, to hang what they think some delicious writing, would do well to pause. They are on a road which leads not to poetic excellence, and, whatever else may be said of it, of this they may be sure, that such handling is no mark of power. And in poetry, especially, be it remembered that "to be weak is to be miserable."

Few, we take it, but must be struck with the graphic manner in which the two armies are contrasted. We have them before us, the Trojans with clang and noise, ogvides ws; the Achæans in silence, determined and careful to cooperate in their movements—ἴσαν σιγῇ μένεα πνείοντες ̓Αχαιοί, Ἐν θυμῷ μεμαῶτες ἀλεξέμεν ἀλλήλοισιν.

How characteristic of human nature in general, and the species ladies' man in particular, that bravado sortie of Paris! Of human nature, that leads the gifted in one particular to try his hand on every other, and of the species supra dicta, to think that success with the women might be very agreeably, and as easily, diversified by triumphs in the rough arena of men. There is something richly absurd in the breadth of the man's challenge. A Greek would not be enough, but the antagonist must be picked out of the best and bravest of the Achæans.* The extravagance of the pretension is perfectly intelligible, on the uniform success attending his achievements in one line prompting his flying at the highest quarry in another and totally opposite. This is what has ever occurred, and will occur to the world's end. This made Richelieu jealous of a literary reputation, and Cicero put up for a poet. Success in its nature generates presumption, and presumption pushes anywhere, and everywhere,

* This is inconsiderately put. He was responsible for the challenge, but not for its form or scope.

to whatever point of the compass. Nor is it too much to say it ensures its own discomfiture. In the instance before us, that discomfiture was in every respect complete. The man who put down this our challenger of the best of all the Greeks, was but a third or fourth rate warrior among those Greeks, and, moreover, the man he had most injured, and before whom he owed it to his leman at home not to appear at disadvantage.

Note how to the life Menelaus' demeanour is given. And the comparison of a lion lighting on a large prey, stag or wild goat, is, as ever in Homer, complete to denote his sensations, as those of Paris at the sight of his rival are hit off by the similitude of one that unawares lights on a serpent. Nor is the account of the bearing of Paris up to the moment of his catching sight of Menelaus without its humour. Menelaus perceives him going in front the array with long strides-μακρά βιβῶντα. Fancy him striding up and down, flourishing his two darts, quite unconscious that Menelaus was eyeing him with grim delight; and no sooner catches a glimpse of him than he falters, and retires into the thick of his companions in arms. Hector's objurgation on his cowardly behaviour is followed by an answer that we have always looked on with admiration. We know not if it has occurred to others, as it did to ourselves on first perusal of Hector's speech, to pause, and, before reading farther, endeavour to frame an answer to it, and, after turning the matter about little to our own satisfaction, then, and not before, see what Paris makes of his very ill case. We confess that Homer's wonderful dexterity in the speeches he puts into the mouths of the actors in his great drama, so pat to the character and to the occasion, never struck us more forcibly. The graceful answer of Paris so meets the points, as far as they can be met, that he rises fifty per cent. in our regard. We see at once, that there is not indeed the stuff