it is a noble one. Where saw ye ever Three such Men-cooks as Achilles, Patroclus, and Automedon ? Lo! the son of Thetis-the goddess-born-with the spit in his " inaccessible hands! Redder is his fine face in the kitchen-fire than it ever was flaming in the van of victorious battle. Is that an apron ? And now from Cooks the Three Princes become Waiters. Achilles is his own Butler.

How much more state in the simplicity of these natural manners than in the pomp of ours, where all is artificial! A modern entertainment is made mean by menials. It cannot bear description-nothing more contemptible than a horse-shoe table, however august the guests, lined with flunkeys at a great city-feast. Compare with this repast of heroes, in the tent of Achilles, that given to four of the great European monarchs some dozen years ago in Guildhall, at which, if we mistake not, presided the Lord Mayor of London! It is Blackwall, we think, who says, that we read with delight all Homer's most minute descriptions of the houses, tables, and way of living of the ancients; but, on the contrary, that when we consider our own customs, we find that our first business, when we sit down to poetise in the higher strains, is to unlearn our daily way of life; to forget our manner of sleeping, eating, and diversions; we are obliged to adopt a set of more natural manners, which, however, are foreign to us; and must be like plants raised up in hotbeds or greenhouses in comparison with those which grow in soils fitted by nature for such productions. Nay, so far, he continues, are we from enriching poetry with new images drawn from nature, that we find it difficult to understand the old. We live within doors, covered from nature's face, and passing our days supinely, ignorant of her beauties. We are apt to think the similes taken from her low, and the ancient manners mean or absurd. But let us be ingenuous, and confess, that while the moderns admire nothing but pomp, and can think nothing great or beautiful but what is the produce of wealth, they exclude themselves from the pleasantest and most natural images that adorn old poetry. State and form disguise men; and wealth and luxury disguise nature. Their effects in writing are answerable; a lord-mayor's show, or grand procession of any kind, is not very delicious reading, if described minutely, and at length; and great ceremony is at least equally tiresome in a poem, as in ordinary conver

sation. So far Blackwall-and he writes like a philosophic gentleman.

But Ajax gives the sign to old Phoenix-and Ulysses, crowning his cup with wine, drinks to Achilles, and, on his legs, volunteers a speech. Let the wily orator stand there for another month or so-and then we shall listen to his eloquence, and give a fine specimen of it from Sotheby, and "the rest."

HOMER AND HIS TRANSLATORS.

CRITIQUE IV.-ACHILLES.

[DECEMBER 1831.]

IT is to little purpose, we think, to attempt to enter into critical disquisitions on what does or does not fall under the description of beauty or of sublimity. Nor is it, in our opinion, of much avail, to go far into metaphysical enumeration of the different elements of which they may be constituted.

We should say, generally, that all the powers of our nature to which delight is annexed, are capable of a beauty of their own. Nor does more appear to be required to produce this perception, than the intimate blending of delight with the object presented; a blending so deep, that the object, when incapable of sense, shall appear to the mind invested with that power of emotion which the mind indeed brings forth from itself. In connection with the fact of this dependence of beauty on the capacity of delight in the soul, and on the power of the object to raise up such a sudden suffusion of that feeling as shall spread over itself, it may be observed, that our feeling to beauty is very variable; and that a state of greatly excited and joyous sensibility is capable of shedding the appearance of beauty over objects and scenes, like the sudden lighting up of sunshine, which do not at other times so recommend themselves to the imagination.

As delight is the source of beauty, so pain and fear, and power, which subdues pain and fear, are the sources of sublimity. There may be said, as possibly we may have somewhere else hinted, to be two classes of sublime objects; those which shake the soul and make it tremble in its strength, and those on the contemplation of which it feels.

itself elated and full of power. Or rather, it may be said, that both these kinds of emotion belong to sublimity; for both may perhaps be felt towards the same object in varying tempers of the mind.

In Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, we believe the first attempt was made to establish terror as the source of sublimity; and assuredly it is one of its great elements. The error of the theory seems to have consisted in describing this as its sole constituent. Thunder, and the roar of ocean, and the roar of human battle, are sublime, because fear and power are there mingled into one. Mountains that lift up their eternal heads into the sky, that hang their loose rocks aloft, and pour the rage of cataracts down their riven cliffs, mingle power and fear together to the human soul that beholds them in its awe. Hence it is that the imagination of men, fearfully awakened in its superstitions, has gathered signs and voices, which to our apprehension are now sublime; because the fears of those who were terror-stricken, and the unknown powers, which were the objects of their dread, are present to our mind together. How has Milton united power, and fear, and physical pangs, in vast and dread sublimity, when he has shown those mighty fallen angels, in their yet unvanquished and seemingly indestructible strength, arraying themselves to new war, in the midst of their dolorous regions of pain, in the dark and fiery dwelling-place of their eternal punishment! Over the whole earth, then, sublimity is spread, wherever fear and power meet together. The shadow of death is sublime, when it has fallen on a whole generation, and buried them in the sleep of sin. The power of decay is sublime, when

"Oblivion swallows cities up,

And mighty states characterless are grated
To dusty nothing."

Every spirit of Power is sublime in itself; every spirit of Fear is sublime, when it has ceased to gripe and crush the heart, when it can be surveyed in Imagination. Pain, which sickens the soul, and humbles it in the dust of mortality, can yet mix with sublimity when it is only half triumphant, and the spirit in its might yet wrestles with the pangs under which it is about to expire.

"I see before me the Gladiator lie,

He leans upon his hand--his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony,
And his droop'd head sinks gradually low—
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one,

Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now

Th' arena swims around him- he is gone,

Ere ceased the inhuman shout that hail'd the wretch who won

Shall he expire,

And unavenged? Arise! ye Goths, and glut your ire.” Pain, endurance, and in death a prophetic dream of retaliation and revenge! Such sublimity did Byron feel in that Dying Gladiator, that, in the troubled light of his far-seeing imagination suddenly inspired, he connected with his fall that of the mightiest of empires, and from the arena's bloody dust arose a vision of siege, storm, and sack-of Rome herself, set on fire by the yet unborn brethren of that one barbarian, "butcher'd to make a Roman holiday," fierce-flocking from their forests to raze with the ground all the imperial palaces of the city of the Cæsars.

Many other elements, no doubt, besides those we have mentioned, may enter into sublimity. What we have wished to indicate, is the region of the soul, where it is to be found. It dwells in the regions of its power-whether that power be made present to its consciousness in calmness; or in the uprisings of its might; or in agitations that reach into its depths. In some of its forms it is totally disunited from Beauty, which lives only in the capacity of Delight. In others it is intimately and indivisibly blended with it. will say in the great poems of Milton or of Homer, where the quality begins or where it ceases? Who will say among the spirits of men, which are to be numbered with the Beautiful, and which with the Sublime?

Who

We commonly seek for examples in the physical world. These offer themselves readily because they have hold upon our senses. But the passion of sublimity is as much moved, and certainly may be more strongly excited, by the delineation of spiritual power. Prometheus! a mighty persecuted spirit, subject to overruling power, and punished without