sesses not a tithe of the romance or the sentiment found in the Homeric heroes and heroines. Even the later and more civilized Greeks looked back with respect and affection to these glorious days, and quoted Homer as the model of good breeding and refinement. And this is the real point of interest in his writings; for, in our day, no amount of luxury and refinement in material life would be accepted as a proof of high civilization. The use of silver and of gold, wrought by the cunning workman; of robes of divers textures, dyed with Phoenician purple; the use even of amber, imported from the distant Baltic ; the luxuries of sponges and of warm baths-all such things, constantly alluded to in the Homeric poems, are yet consistent with great barbarism. We desire to find among them not merely the implements, but the sentiments of civilized men. And as war was their chief occupation, let us examine their notions of honour and of fair play, as well as of humanity and of respect towards the weak.

But remember that we have to do with a people naturally neither very courageous nor very honest. No doubt, it seems very strange to say that a people constantly occupied in war were failing in personal courage. Nevertheless it is true; for not only among nations, but among individuals, you may have observed that the most pugnacious and quarrelsome are by no means the bravest. And in the case of the Greeks, there is ample evidence throughout their history that they were not brave in the sense applied to the heroes of chivalry and the soldiers of our own

armies.

With the two exceptions of Diomede and Ulysses - which can be accounted for on special grounds, all Homer's heroes are represented as running away on various occasions, and as running away too under the influence of panic. Still worse, the noblest heroes are said by Ulysses to have been weeping and lamenting with fright when they were about to be concealed within the celebrated horse, just before the capture of Troy; and Achilles is highly delighted, and stalks in great strides down the meadow of Asphodel when he hears that his son was the solitary exception, and showed no signs of terror and of despair. Of course, the gods are usually called in to account for such panics by the courtly poet, whose songs were recited to the descendants of these chiefs. But still the facts are there; and the same thing occurs constantly throughout all Greek history, except in the case of the highly-disciplined Spartans.

No doubt, many important circumstances can be urged in palliation of this defect in the Homeric chiefs. There was, of course, want of discipline and of the support of masses. There was also a great sensitiveness in Greek human nature, which causes men to picture to themselves vividly the pains of death, and to shrink from them, while the dulness of coarser natures protects them from such anticipations. But, above all, the Homeric Greek had nothing to hope for after this life had passed away. He believed, indeed, in a future state, and the poet has not omitted to give us a picture of that

state. But profoundly interesting as is this picture— one of our earliest evidences of the belief in immortality-there is no more melancholy passage in all the story; for while the heroes retain all their intellect and their capacities, their powers of joy and of suffering, of love and of hate, they have no new aims nor employments, nor even hopes; and while their strength and their beauty are but dim reflections of their former selves, and their voices fainter than the husky tones of decrepid old age, their only pleasure is to live over again in memory the glory of their life on earth, and to catch with breathless interest the stray echoes that reach them from the upper world. We cannot, then, expect from them the courage of the Christian warrior.

And perhaps it is to some extent a consequence of this, that they were not a very honest nation; for the two defects are likely to be connected in the same character. I do not mean to say merely that in this age of imperfect civilization the rights of property were not fully recognized: this would have been a defect of the Homeric age, and not of the people. We find in Homer piracy alluded to as quite a respectable occupation; and, indeed, the national fancy for this profession has never since disappeared, for it existed even during the most civilized period of Greek history, under the designation of maritime enterprise and love of adventure. But quite apart from the defects of the age, we must notice an inherent imperfection in the Greek national character-an imperfection which developed itself terribly in later Greek

history, and was, doubtless, the main cause of the decay of the nation: I mean the overrating of intellectual, as compared with moral, qualities. We shall find this defect so magnified at a later epoch, that cleverness is openly preferred to honesty.

In the Homeric age, it seems as if the analysis of mental qualities into intellectual and moral had hardly been felt or stated. There is no hero singled out for moral qualities only-there is not even a Homeric expression for a morally good man, as such. King Menelaus, who is, perhaps, the most honourable and chivalrous of all the chiefs in sentiment, is only a second-rate character, because he has not the physical power of Achilles or the intellect of Ulysses; and this latter, Homer's greatest human hero, is above his fellows "in stratagem and in the use of the oath." The words used to be translated-plausibly enough, too— "in knavery and perjury," and this must have been the rendering in the minds even of the Attic tragedians. But Homer seems to have meant that he not only knew the best means of taking advantage of his enemies, but also of guarding against treacherous retaliation, by compelling or inducing them to bind themselves by an oath; for, as might be expected, the honour of that day had a purely religious foundation. The gods hated deceit and treachery, when it was obtruded upon their notice; but within certain limits, and in purely human transactions, where the wrath of the gods was not apprehended, deceit was lawful, and even praiseworthy; for I do not think that the Homeric Greek considered a dishonourable

action as an injury done to the dignity of his nature in his own eyes. This very subtle, but now common, notion of our own personal dignity, and our duties towards it, had, I think, no place in the minds of these primitive men; perhaps, indeed, its existence, or at least its prevalence amongst us, may be due wholly to Germanic sentiment, deepened and ennobled by Christianity. The Homeric chief would not commit acts of cowardice or perjury, because he was ashamed of his family and friends, or because the gods would punish him; but the social and religious basis of the feeling of honour was, so to speak, an external or foreign basis, and not founded upon the dignity with which a man feels bound to treat his own nature.

Nor were the claims of others upon him the claims of human nature as such, but the personal claims of special persons. His honour, his compassion, his respect, were all individual ties, which bound him to individual men, and which were, in almost all cases, secured by an oath; even the helpless suppliant is afraid to venture into a stranger's house, without flying to the hearth, and so obtaining a sacred claim upon the protection of his host.

After all these limitations and restrictions, you will, perhaps, not be prepared to hear that the sense of honour was highly developed among the Homeric Greeks; yet it was so, at least among that limited class brought before us in the old epic poems-the military and social aristocracy of the day. The instances of this feeling are many and striking. The