he established (i. e. raised into life and celebrity) all modes of excellence, nara jaßdov. It is a poet's way of saying that Homer did this as a rhapsodos. Rhabdos, therefore, is used as the symbol of a rhapsodos; it is, or it may be conceived to be, his instrument for connecting the narrative poem which gives him his designation. But what instrument? Is it a large darning needle for sewing the parts together? If so, Homer will want a thimble. No, says one big solemn critic, not a needle: none but an ass would think of such a thing. Well, old fellow, what is it then? It is, says he, a cane —a wand-a rattan. And what is Homer to do with a cane? Why, understand, that when his singing robes were on, (for it is an undoubted fact, that the ancient rhapsodos not only chanted in full pontificals, but had two sets of robes, crimson when he chanted the Iliad, violet-coloured when he chanted the Odyssey), in that case the rhapsodos held a stick in his right hand. But what sort of a stick? Stick is a large genus, running up from switch to cudgel, from rod to bludgeon. And our own persuasion is that this stick or pencil of wood had something to do with the roll of remembrances, (not perhaps written copies, but mechanical suggestions for recovering the main succession of paragraphs,) which the rhapsodos used as short-hand notes for aiding his per

formance. But this is a subject which we must not pursue.

The other passage of Pindar is in the second Nemean―'Oliv weg nai ‘Oμnειδαι ραπτων ἐπίων τα πολλ ̓ ἀοιδοι άρχονται. Of a certain conqueror at the games, Pindar says-that he took his beginning, his coup d'essai, from that point, viz. Jove whence the Homeridæ take theirs; alluding to the prelusive hymns. Now, what seems most remarkable to us in this passage is, the art with which Pindar identifies the three classes of1. Homerida-2. Aoidoi-3. Rhapsodoi. The words ῥαπτων ἐπεων ἀοιδοι are an ingenious way of expressing that the aoidoi were the same as the rhapsodoi. Now, where Pindar saw no essential difference, except as a species differs from a genus, it is not likely that we of this day shall detect one. At all events, it is certain that no discussion connected with any one of these three classes has thrown any light upon the main question as to the integrity of the Iliad. The aoidoi, and perhaps the rhapsodoi, certainly existed in the days of Homer. The Homerida must have arisen after him: but when, or under what circumstances, no record remains to say. Only the place of the Homerida is known: it was Crete: and this seems to connect them personally with HoBut all is too obscure to peneand in fact has not been pene

mer.

trate

trated.

Do you in earnest, my dear Eusebius, congratulate me on being a grandfather a grandfather, like the infant, of some weeks old-the insigne and proper mark of an incipient second infancy? Two more such births, and you will write me Nestor: and when will it be your pleasure to ask me if I have yet lived up to be the old crow? You know very well that I never keep birthdays-and so you are determined to note down one against me. You have often said that you pride yourself upon being the young Eusebius, because your friend Eugene is older than you, and his father is living: so, as you argue, your friend being Eugene the younger, yet older than you, you must be Eusebius the younger! It is thus, in your ingenuity, you try to cheat Time, and are but cheating yourself: and there is Time mocking and jeering you, out at the very corners of your laughter-loving eyes; and while you, and all the world about you, think it is nothing but a display of your own wit, there sits the thief, nicely pencilling his crows' feet, and marking you as surely his own, as if you had been a tombstoned grandfather, and ancestor to twenty generations. So, be not proud, Eusebius !

:

Do you really think me of such an infantine taste as to delight in such things? And here is the age overstocked already; and Miss Martineau and the Utilitarians abstain from marriage, that babies may not be born, or that they may be themselves, in their own persons, the big monopolists of babyism and you, I see, mean to make a prate about these delinquencies of me and mine! I remember when there was an universal taste for infant Cupids-that was in Bartolozzi's time-printed in red, to look more rosy! Every thing was then embellished with babyism-cards, boxes, perfumery, bijouterie, frontispieces to grave books-universal was the cupidity for infantine show. Taste was in its infancy, certainly; but the offspring could not keep it up, or some, such as Bartolozzi's, floated off by their own lightness and flimsiness;

while others sank by their weightheavy-blubber, would-be bubbles, with a pair of silly butterfly-wings, each of them tacked on to their shoulders! From those days to the present unhappy ones of great mouths and little loaves, the world has never gone on right-all squabbling in this great nursery! No wonder our orphan asylums and lying-in hospitals were full, and required additions and additional subscriptions, before such a taste as that for babyism could be put down. It is a happy thing that they have discovered more land to the South, and it is all taken possession of in the name of Queen Victoria. We shall want room, space for vitalitywe shall be so thick here, that we shall nudge each other into the sea for standing room; and, if the manufactory monopolists have it all their own way, we shall have to import pap. There is a state of things to look toto import pap, and grow infants!!

I wish, Eusebius, you had the nursing of half a dozen of them for a month or two, that you might congratulate me. I cannot but imagine I see you, Philosopher Eusebius, officially petticoated for your new duties -now half-distracted with an ebullition of squalling, and your own utter incapacity; and now trying to interpret and reduce into some of your recondite and learned languages, inarticulate sounds-practising the nurse's vocabulary, and speculating upon it as a charm; while the poor things, all their little wants neglected, would treat you as the lady's lapdog did the private tutor of Lucian, showing indignity to the Greek philosopher's beard. Then should I like to congratulate you on your acceptance of office!

You see what babble you have set me into-showing the state I am getting into the second state of it! Never mind, Eusebius! You will come to it too: you get a little garrulous, and not with knowledge neither. We have both, as the worid goes, a lack enough of that. You and I should both be plucked at an infant school; and take care they don't set

up one in every parish, for children from five feet eight to six feet high! Yet I should not wonder if you were to take upon yourself to be examiner. Don't do it! Children now are born with knowledge in their heads, more than you or I had acquired at the age of ten! Every one now is a young Hermes: they are born with so much in their heads, they look overloaded with it, like human tadpoles; and that is the reason they can't stand, and, when they do begin to walk, go at an amazing pace, because they can't stand steady under it: and that sort of mad run is now-a-days called, to give some dignity to the absurdity, "the march of intellect!" Don't say any moresuch a one has no more sense than a child; or, if you do, clothe it in Greek-for I don't think the infant schoolmistress is yet mistress of that —so you may just spout it out from Menander

“ Η πανταπασι παιδαρίου γνώμην έχει.” Greece was said to be the "cradle of the arts;" but now arts, and sciences too, spring from every cradle. When a child throws out his five fingers, you may conclude he is calculating, Tara: he has algebraized before he can speak

"And lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers

came ! "

Γελω

this childishness. Folly, fanning her "Ship of Fools"-of old fools, Eusebius-and the whole infant-school standing by, shouting "good voyage to you!" laugh at it Eusebius if you can, and you have the gift of laughter. To come into the world crying, and to go out of it laughing, is the end of the fool's philosophy. favor, says Homer-they died with laughter; (so you see, by-the-by, that expression is not new.) But take care, as I was going to say, you don't laugh too much, nor at too many things, nor at too many men, women, no, nor children either; or, as the world is going, you may chance to have the laugh against you-and mock not me in my grand-paternity. Such things must happen; but let us take them quietly-not go cackling about, like the stupid hen telling the whole parish about her one egg. Rejoice as much as you like when your own quiver is full, and then it will be time to have a grand "archery meeting."

66

Many a man," they say, "talks of Robin Hood that never shot with his bow." Put yourself in the predicament, and then banter about other people's bantlings. Who ever heard of such a thing before, as being complimented upon being a grandfather? In all your learning, where do you find that? Telemachus's grandfather was quietly passed off to pig with the swineherd, and plant cabbages, or Your patsomething of that kind. tern of female virtues, Andromache, endearingly calls her Hector, her father, her mother, &c., but never "Cousin, uncle, goes further back. aunt," was left for very burlesque. Even Sheridan's unlicenced wit (yet am I not wrong there, for he was licenced, or the theatre was,) never touched the grandfather. He is the very old nurse's scarecrow to frighten children, or was-for children, though now born frightful, are not born frightenable. He used to be the "father long-legs, that couldn't say his prayers," and therefore to be "taken by his left leg and thrown down-stairs”—and he is treated accordingly as worse than an infidel. There is a Mrs Sherwood has written good books for children, and always tells them how Master Bad-boy, of a year or two old, was all of a sudden, instanter, without a why or wherefore, in the midst of his wicked idleness, converted into Mr Good-boy, and went and preached to his wicked,

abominable, old grandfather, and converted him-a child upon the forlorn hope. They are mere pegs to hang any thing upon, just as authors choose-if they speak of them at all, it is not with respect. Do you know a single novel wherein the grandfather is the hero? If one is unfortunate enough to be introduced, is he not sure to be knocked on the head at last, that the happy couple may enjoy his fortune? He is generally killed outright, to get rid of him as soon as possible; and he is made unamiable, a sour, morose, and stingy curmudgeon, that none may regret his departure. He is made a glutton, to be more readily dispatched by apoplexy, and is given fairly to understand-that he was introduced for no other earthly reason than to be got rid of.

"Edisti satis atque bibisti,

Tempus abire tibi est."

And so generally ends that "Tale of a Grandfather." Grandfathers are not introduced into plays either, because they are so put aside in real life-only considered just to give their names to their grandchildren, as if it were no longer fit to be their own. At best, they are each in his son's or daughter's family but a sort of head nurse, to take the children an airing, to lift them over stiles, and if any thing goes wrong, the veriest urchins are ready enough to pin the fault on the right person. I said they were not introduced upon the stage, but they are in the old fool that runs after his runaway Columbine-and do not your Terences and Plautuses exhibit you the same folly? If authors of any kind have any thing to do with them at all, it is to put them in some ridiculous light-they are expected to do all sorts of impossibilities.

"A painted vest Prince Vortigern had on, Which from a naked Pict his grandsire won."

Who but a grandsire would have been sent upon such a fool's errand as that? So it ever was- -Your favourite classics do not treat them much better Admetus coolly asks the grandfather of his children (in the Alcestis of Euripides) to step out of the world for him into the grave, with no more ado than if he had requested him to step to the corner of the street to the apothecary's, for his elixir of life. And how often do those old authors make the old gentlemen perfectly ridiculous,

by assuming in their names and persons an extraordinary imbecile fury, when in their feebleness they snatch up arms and talk big? And your friend Virgil sins in this way: had he had the good taste of Homer before him, who treats old Priam with singular respect, he would never have so put to death even the progenitor of such a numerous race, nor made him hurl his "telum imbelle sine ictu." But this author treats them throughout infamously. Only see the ridiculous position of Anchises riding picka-back, with all Ascanius's playthings in his hands, and you see plainly enough he has nothing to do after but to die and be forgotten; for his famous doings are not in the catalogue for the young Ascanius's remembrance, but it is

"Et pater Æneas et avunculus excitat Hector."

But to speak of Virgil before Homer, is indeed to put the cart before the horse- and a lumbering sonorous cart too, that had carried dung for the pitchfork, and Tytyrus's cheese to market, before it was laden with the remnant of furniture saved from Troy;

So,

be that as it may-go back to the original genius of epic and of history. I reminded you how old Laertes was treated; with that exception, the good Homer is nearly the only author that fairly respects the "venerables. " Hobbes, by the by, in his translation of a passage of Homer in Thucydides, calls their wives their " venerable bedfellows." Homer, I say, does treat Priam with respect, and gives him a god as a conductor-the old king is never made ridiculous. Alcinous too, who, if he was not actually, was on the point of being a grandfather, does nothing absurd. There is only the slightest hint given that he is a little under the family rule, just enough to show what he was coming to-the being made a grandfather. One ought to be ashamed to speak of that mythology; but it shows the manners of that age-and others are too like it; does any of his grandchildren show respect for discarded Saturn? He had swallowed stones enough to mend the roads of a county, yet is as quietly set aside as the giant Rabelais speaks of, who, though he had swallowed windmills, was choked with a pat of butter. You, Eusebius, have always the classics in your mouth; so I bring them

to your remembrance, that you may see even through their spectacles, that there is no occasion to congratulate any one on the birth of a grandchild. But if authors so treat or pass by these aged gentlemen, tell me, if you can, any one author of tale, novel, or play, that ever wrote a line for a grandfather reader. Neither "gentle reader," nor "courteous reader," is addressed to them. It is curious, but, if you consider it, you will find, that by nearly all authors' eyes, their readers are seen distinctly as considerably under thirty years of age-most, indeed, are under twenty! You see at once what tastes authors cater for. There is little, indeed, in common with any but mere juvenile heads and hearts. Amidst all the mass of daily literature, either to amuse or to instruct, there is scarcely a soothing plaster for old age-even our modern divines have given up grand sires and grandmothers. They belong to the Hospital of Incurables. They are not excitable enough; and can't learn so easily the trick, nor acquire the privilege, of presenting gloves, nosegays, and silver tea spoons: so that there is scarcely a stray sermon printed for them, and that only by Subscription. They are, in fact, expected to read nothing but the newspapers, which are common to all; and they are printed in such wretchedly small type, as plainly to show that such readers are not much thought of. No, Eusebius; the "reading public" are under age. The young march of intellect has tripped up the old one's heels the abstruse sciences are reduced to easy slip-slop literature for the young. A child may teach his grandfather, but a grandfather will never teach his child again: so that race are altogether left out of consideration, even in publications of "Tutors' Assistants." There has been, indeed, a sort of attempt of late to get up statistics for the old folk; but it is a lame and quizzical thing.

I am told that now there are very few grandsires in the great scientific body peripatetic. They run about the world at such a rate-" modo me Thebis modo ponit Athenis"-that the respectably aged scientifics cannot possibly keep pace with them. Even if they can bear the fatigue of getting to the places, they are sadly footweary with the perpetual motion required, the very first day of the series;

so they get knocked up-die off-and the rest take warning!

I tell you, the whole system of things is a sort of general vote of mankind, that there are to be neither grandfathers nor grandmothers-that is, acknowledged as such; of which many must be exceedingly glad, seeing that their grandsires have been, something like their old clothes, rather shabby "inexpressibles." We follow the fashion of "Young France," and kick "Old France!" There, too, writers are all for young readers: we are begrudged our very spectacles, that we should read at all!

The last professed author that wrote for grandsires was the kind-hearted Sir Walter Scott; and that he did in some of his prefaces. Fielding, however, before him, was glorious in this respect. Tom Jones is a wonderful work: there are nuts to crack in it for those who have cut their wise teeth; it is deep, and there is something for every time of life.

But, Eusebius, if literature thus shamefully passes old grandfathers, or treats them contemptuously, what say you to music and painting? Handel and Purcell composed music for men, grand and thought-creating! Who composes music now, but mere tintinabula of folly or licentiousness, with their butterfly flip flap flights, and die-away cadences? I am sure of this

The pre

that neither grandfathers nor grandmothers ought to be present when their grandchildren trill and warble interminable variations, that either have no meaning, or a bad one. sent musical world won't compose for those old people who go about with cotton in their ears; and really, as things are, the best thing they can do is not to take it out, but to add a little more wadding, that they might have a chance of not hearing!

Painting is worse. Look at the print-shops, and tell me what you see there fit for a grandfather's eyes: there is no appeal to his taste-to his feelings. We no longer have put before us the fine, pure, dignified subjects of saints and martyrs, nor grave and poetic history-painting heroic virtue, or meditation meet for age. We have prettinesses for children without end-plenty for that age which "gaudet equis canibusque;" and wanton portraits, that shame the sitters, and make sinners. They won't now, Eusebius, give a penny for a