"horse marines" had not begun to show out; and a proper " troop-ship" must have been as little known to Agamemnon as the right kind of Havanna cigars, or as duelling pistols to Menelaus. that they were true. An interval as great as four centuries, when all relation between the house of Priam and the surrounding population would have been obliterated, must have caused such petty anecdotes to lose their entire interest, and, in that case, they would never have reached Homer. Here, therefore, is a collateral indication that Homer lived probably within two centuries of Troy. On the other hand, if the Iliad had ever become so obsolete in its diction that popular feeling called for a diaskeué, or thorough recast; in that case, we argue that all such trivial circumstances (interesting only to those who knew them for facts) would have dropped out of the composition. VI. That argument is of a nature to yield us an extensive field, if we had space to pursue it. The following, which we offer as our argument, is negative: it lies in the absence of all anachronisms, which would most certainly have arisen in any modern remodelling, and which do in fact disfigure all the Greek forgeries of letters, &c., in Alexandrian ages. How inevi table, amongst a people so thoroughly uncritical as the Greeks, would have been the introduction of anachronisms by wholesale, had a more modern hand been allowed to tamper with the texture of the poem! But, on the contrary, all inventions, rites, usages, known to have been of later origin than the Homeric ages, are absent from the Iliad. For instance, in any recast subsequent to the era of 700 B. C., how natural it would have been to introduce the trumpet! And cavalry again, how excellent a resource for varying and inspiriting the battles: whereas Homer introduces horses only as attached to the chariots; and the chariots as used only by a few leading heroes, whose heavy mail made it impossible for them to go on foot, as the mass of the army did. Why, then, did Homer himself forbear to introduce cavalry? Was he blind to the variety he would have gained for his descriptive scenes? No; but simply upon the principle, so absolute for him, of adhering to the facts. But what caused the fact? Why was there no cavalry? Evidently from the enormous difficulty of carrying any number of horses by sea, under the universal non-adaptation to such a purpose of the Greek shipping. The VII. A seventh argument for the integrity of our present Iliad in its main section, lies in the nexus of its subordinate parts. Every canto in this main section implies every other. Thus the funeral of Hector implies that his body had been ransomed. That fact implies the whole journey of Priam to the tents of Achilles. Tuis implies the death and last combat of Hector. But how should Hector and Achilles have met in battle, after the wrathful vow of Achilles? That argues the death of Patroclus as furnishing the sufficient motive. But the death of Patroclus argues the death of Sarpedon, the Trojan ally, which it was that roused the vindictive fury of Hector. These events in their turn argue the previous success of the Trojans, which had moved Patroclus to interfere. And this success of the Trojans argues the absence of Achilles, which again argues the feud with Agamemnon. The whole of this story unfolds like a process of vegetation. And the close intertexture of the several parts is as strong a proof of unity in the design and execution, as the intense life and consistency in the conception of Achilles. VIII. By an eighth argument, we reply to the objection sometimes made to the transmission of the Iliad, through the rhapsodoi, from the burden which so long a poem would have imposed upon the memory. Some years ago was published, in this journal, a paper on the Flight of the Kalmuck Tartars from Russia. Bergmann, the German, from whom that account was chiefly drawn, resided for a long time amongst the Kalmucks, and had frequent opportunities of hearing musical recitations from the Dschangariade. This is the great Tartar epic; and it extends to 360 cantos, each averaging the length of an Homeric book. Now, it was an ordinary effort for a minstrel to master a score of these cantos, which amounts pretty nearly to the length of the Iliad. But a case more entirely in point is found in a minor work of Xenophon's. A young man is there introduced as boasting that he could repeat by heart the whole of the Iliad and the Odysseya feat, by the way, which has been more than once accomplished by English schoolboys. But the answer made to this young man is, that there is nothing at all extraordinary in that; for that every common rhapsodos could do as much. To us, indeed, the whole objection seems idle. The human memory is capable of far greater efforts; and the music would prodigiously lighten the effort. But, as it is an objection often started, we may consider it fortunate that we have such a passage as this in Xenophon, which not only illustrates the kind of qualification looked for in a rhapsodos, but shows also that such a class of people continued to practise in the generation subsequent to that of Pericles. and retiring in clouded majesty. Even thus, though having now so excellent a plea for leaving the army, and though aware of the early death that awaited him if he staid, he disdains to profit by the evasion. We see him still living in the tented field, and generously unable to desert those who had so insultingly deserted him. We see him in a dignified retirement, fulfilling all the duties of religion, friendship, hospitality; and, like an accomplished man of taste, cultivating the arts of peace. We see him so far surrendering his wrath to the earnest persuasion of friendship, that he comes forth at a critical moment for the Greeks to save them from ruin. What are his arms? He has none at all. Simply by his voice he changes the face of the battle. He shouts, and nations fly from the sound. Never but once again is such a shout recorded by a poet "He call'd so loud, that all the hollow deep Of hell resounded." Upon these eight arguments we build. This is our case. They are amply sufficient for the purpose. Homer is not a person known to us separately and previously, concerning Who called? That shout was the whom we are inquiring whether, in shout of an archangel. Next we see addition to what else we know of him, him reluctantly allowing his dearest he did not also write the Iliad. "Ho- friend to assume his own arms; the mer" means nothing else but the man kindness and the modesty of his nawho wrote the Iliad. Somebody, you ture forbidding him to suggest, that will say, must have written it? True; not the divine weapons but the immorbut, if that somebody should appear tal arm of the wielder had made them by any probable argument, to have invincible. His friend perishes. Then been a multitude of persons, there goes we see him rise in his noontide wrath, to wreck the unity which is essential before which no life could stand. The to the idea of a Homer. Now, this frenzy of his grief makes him for a unity is sufficiently secured, if it should time cruel and implacable. He sweeps appear that a considerable section of the field of battle like a monsoon. the Iliad and that section by far the His revenge descends perfect, sudden, most full of motion, of human interest, like a curse from heaven. We now of tragical catastrophe, and through recognise the goddess-born. This is which runs, as the connecting prin- his avatar. Had he moved to battle ciple, a character the most brilliant, under the ordinary motives of Ajax, magnanimous, and noble, that Pagan Diomed, and the other heroes, we morality could conceive-was, and never could have sympathized or gone must have been, the work and con- along with so withering a course. ception of a single mind. Achilles We should have viewed him as a revolves through that section of the "scourge of God," or fiend, born for Iliad in a series of phases, each of the tears of wives and the maledictions which looks forward and backward to of mothers. But the poet, before he all the rest. He travels like the sun would let him loose upon men, creates through his diurnal course. We see for him a sufficient, or at least palliathim first of all rising upon us as a ing motive. In the sternest of his princely counseller for the welfare of acts, we read only the anguish of his the Grecian host. We see him atro- grief. This is surely the perfection ciously insulted in this office; yet still, of art. At length the work of dethough a king and unused to opposi- struction is finished; but, if the poet tion, and boiling with youthful blood, leaves him at this point, there would nevertheless commanding his passion, be a want of repose, and we should be left with a painful impression of his hero as forgetting the earlier humanities of his nature, and brought forward only for final exhibition in his terrific phases. Now, therefore, by machinery the most natural, we see this great hero travelling back within our gentler sympathies, and revolving to his rest like the sun disrobed of his blazing terrors. We see him settling down to that humane and princely character in which he had been first exhibited we see him relenting at the sight of Priam's grey hairs, touched with the sense of human calamity, and once again mastering his passion-grief now, as formerly he had mastered his wrath. He consents that his feud shall sleep he surrenders the corpse of his capital enemy; and the last solemn chords of the poem rise with a solemn intonation from the grave of "Hector, the tamer of horses "that noble soldier who had so long been the column of his country, and to whom, in his dying moments, the stern Achilles had declared-but then in the middle career of his grief-that no honour-believe, that the Odyssey belongs to a able burial should ever be granted. What effect such an Achilleis, abstracted from the Iliad, would probably leave upon the mind, it happens that we can measure by our own childish experience. In Russell's Ancient Europe, a book much used in the last century, there is an abstract of the Iliad, which presents very nearly the outline of an Achilleis, such as we have supposed. The heroes are made to speak in a sort of stilted, or at least buskined language, not unsuited to a youthful taste; and from the close convergement of the separate parts, the interest is condensed. This book, in our eighth year, we read. It was our first introduction to the "Tale of Troy divine;" and we do not deceive ourselves in saying, that this memorable experience drew from us the first unselfish tears that ever we shed; and by the stings of grief which it left behind, demonstrated its own natural pathos. Such is the outline of an Achilleis, as it might be gathered from the Iliad; and for the use of schools we are surprised that such a beautiful whole has not long since been extracted. A tale, more affecting by its story and vicissitudes, does not exist; and, after this, who cares in what order the non-essential parts of the poem may be arranged, or whether Homer was their author? It is sufficient that one mind must have executed this Achilleis, in consequence of its intense unity. Every part implies every other part. With such a model before him as this poem on the wrath of Achilles, Aristotle could not carry his notions of unity too high. And the unifying mind which could conceive and execute this Achilleis-that is what we mean by Homer. As well might it be said, that the parabola described by a cannon-ball was in one half due to a first discharge, and in the other half to a second, as that one poet could lay the preparations for the passion and sweep of such a poem, whilst another conducted it to a close. Creation does not proceed by instalments: the steps of its revolution are not successive, but simultaneous and the last book of the Achilleis was undoubtedly conceived in the same moment as the first. Whether the same mind conceived also the Odyssey, is a separate ques tion. We are certainly inclined to post-Homeric generation-to the gen eration of the Nostoi, or homeward voyages of the several Grecian chiefs. And with respect to all the burlesque or satiric poems ascribed to Homer, such as the Batrachomyomachia, the Margites, &c., the whole fiction seems to have arisen out of an uncritical blunder; they had been classed as Homeric poems-meaning by the word "Homeric," simply that they had a relation or reference to Homer, which they certainly have. At least we may say this of the Batrachomyomachia, which still survives, that it undoubtedly points to the Iliad as a mockheroic parody upon its majestic forms and diction. In that sense it is Homeric-i. e. it relates to Homer's poetry; it presupposes it as the basis of its own fun. But subsequent generations, careless and uncritical, understood the word Homeric to meanactually composed by Homer. impossible this was, the reader may easily imagine to himself by the parallel case of our own parodies on Scripture. What opening for a parody could have arisen in the same age as that Scriptural translation? "Howbeit," "peradventure," "lifted up his voice and wept," "found favour in thy sight,"-phrases such as these have, to our modern feelings, a deep How 1841.] colouring of antiquity; placed, there- which an unlearned public imagined; A CHURCHYARD ECLOGUE. BY THOMAS AIRD. A BROODING silence fills the twilight churchyard; Seems big with gleams of something, restless, yearning, Her hutching loins upon the waiting earth. The smother'd throes are o'er, the darkness melts Into a glistering troop of blessed ghosts; And thus the thinned and relieved air Lends modulation to their spiritual meanings : FIRST GHOST. Disembodied, we on high Name not faculty nor sense, Where the soul's one confluence Of clear knowledge, and of praise, Yet we, the waiting dust would don, And with the assumed eye we're fain Renewing, as we feebly can, Thus the blessed speech of man. SECOND GHOST. Through the alternate day and night Whirls the glimmering ball of earth ; Swifter far our vision'd flight, Swifter than a thought has birth. THIRD GHOST. O'er the shadowy vales we go, O'er the silent hills of snow, O'er the city, and its cries Heard from Belial's nightly sties, And deserts where no dwellers be, O'er the land and o'er the sea; Till from the east the o'ertaking light Co-mingles with the rear of night. FOURTH GHOST. I had a wife; what earnest, trembling pen Shall tell her love for me? what words of men? Spouse of my heart and life! how harsh the pain The unconscious third could not his loss bewail; |