some, interminable meal on the skull and brains of the Archbishop, and replies to his living interrogator:

'Tu vuoi ch' io rinnovelli

Disperato dolor che il cuor mi preme

Già pur pensando pria ch' io ne favelli.'

And he speaks, in fact, only that he may obtain a further, and a finer kind of revenge. Many other poets have improved what they borrowed; but we can recall no instance of such complete appropriation as this. Certainly, no phrases can be imagined capable of expressing with more tremendous energy the rage of him who perished in the Torre della Fame than those first let drop at the Phæacian banquet, to reverberate, after two thousand years, in the black pit of Antenora.

The current mediæval authorities for the Tale of Troy were Dictys of Crete, who followed Idomeneus to the siege, and Dares, the Phrygian priest of Hephaestus, father of the youthful Phegeus, slain by Diomed. The works attributed to these fictitious personages were of uncertain or fraudulent origin, and survived only in Latin translations executed, no one could say when, or by whom. They availed, indeed, to acclimatise the Ilionic legend in the new world of chivalric romance; yet neither Dictys nor Dares transmitted any report as to the last voyage of Ulysses. The avowal made in the Malebolge was, in fact, a completely novel disclosure; it had the fascination of post-mortem autobiography; it claimed the authenticity of a communication by a ghost from the grave. Hints for its construction may, however, have been derived from the narratives of Genoese mariners, and in particular from the fate of an expedition which sailed into the Atlantic, never to return, in 1291.* Further, some variant of the story of Sindbad, brought from the East by crusaders, possibly, it has been conjectured, set its stamp upon the mysterious submergence of the ship of Ulysses. But such thin and broken threads of tradition could have provided, at the most, only a fragment of the canvas upon which a master hand painted his marvellous picture-a picture so vivid as to create an illusion of absolute historical accuracy. Not a mere fanciful presentment, but the truth of fact seems to be there. We can with difficulty shake off the impression that a genuine revelation has been afforded to us. We, in a manner, overhear the orazion picciola which

* Moore, 'Studies in Dante,' i. 264.

animated the crew of lank and brown' mariners, storm'seasoned against Fate,'* to the mad enterprise of sailing to where the pole-star set. And we realise, as the words fall, the desperate daring of the transgression they were urged to-the transgression of bounds set to navigation by a demigod, when he planted his Pillars at the mouth of the Inland Sea.

A truth higher than that of fact is, indeed, conveyed by the episode. It convinces the imagination because it corresponds with the essential nature of things. It supplies a felt need; the Dantesque is the indispensable complement to the Homeric Ulysses. The theme of the Odyssey is the character of a man:

*Ανδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μούσα, πολύτροπον.

Its treatment absorbed the interest of fourscore generations; yet it left something to be desired. The 'lame and impotent conclusion' indicated for a life strenuous beyond example was a patent incongruity. Ulysses could not be left finally to eat his heart out cooped on a rock, with no enemies to circumvent, no dangers to meet or evade, no new experience to assimilate. Not even Penelope might hold him to the end. Such a man was bound to take his life in both hands, and determine, instead of awaiting, the stroke of destiny. It was thus with a kind of radiant fitness that Dante led him away to perish in pursuit of the Unknown. The world was still young, and had not lost its glamour; life preserved its strange witchery when he deliberately turned from it to face the dim possibilities of death.

Tennyson, with all the learning of all the Homeric commentators, from Zenodotus to Payne Knight, at command, chose to follow the Dantesque tradition. Written soon after Arthur Hallam's death (September 15, 1833), his incomparable 'Ulysses' was designed as a sort of rallying-cry to his own life, defeated and stupefied by the shock.

'The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
"Tis not too late to seek a newer world.'

He exhorted himself when, as a dramatic precursor of
Columbus, he addressed

'Souls, that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me,' welded to himself in

'One equal temper of heroic hearts.'

Sir E. Arnold's' Voyage of Ithobal,' p. 15.

This tribute, indeed, to the men who, in times past, had mutinied under the leadership of Eurylochus, takes us somewhat aback. But the modern poet had resolved to ignore the ugly business in Thrinacria, which his mediæval predecessor had evidently never heard of. For both, then equally, the solar herds remained intact; they were left to graze and chew the cud in peace, instead of bellowing portentously upon spits; no crime was committed; no penalty had to be exacted; and Ulysses effected his return, not, as Homer related, in the guise of a solitary castaway, but in command of his own 'vermilion-prowed' ship, worked by a faithful crew.

Tennyson usually took his classical subjects from uncanonical sources. Like the Attic dramatists and vasepainters, he preferred the cyclical and post-Homeric outgrowths to the authorised legends. Enone caught his fancy in the pages of Quintus Smyrnæus, familiarly known as 'Quintus Calaber;' and 'Quintus Calaber' was only rescued from oblivion by Cardinal Bessarion's discovery of the fourteen Books of his Trojan epic among the manuscript treasures of a convent at Otranto. He wrote it in journeyman fashion in Asia Minor, probably soon after the death of Constantine. And, through the magic of Tennysonian verse, a creation of loveliness took shape from the

'Grecian tale re-told, Which, cast in later Grecian mould,

Quintus Calaber

Somewhat lazily handled of old.'

Quintus, too, intimated the possibility of a meeting with the great Achilles' in the Happy Isles far away to the West. The Homeric Ulysses was fully aware of the place and lot of Achilles after death. He saw and conversed with him in Hades, and reported his sombre dissatisfaction at finding himself a helpless subject of Persephone. Through the reverence, however, of later legend-mongers, he was transferred from her realm to the honourable status of a Pontic hero. The island of Leukê, near the mouth of the Borysthenes, was assigned as his abode, with Medea his wife; and he made its approach perilous, being a wrathful ghost, difficult of propitiation, and even capable of dark atrocities. Then, as the centuries rolled on, and the Euxine became frequented, his residence there began to appear incongruous, and his quarters were shifted further afield. Quintus Calaber established him in the Fortunate Islands,

well beyond the range of ordinary cruises. Tennyson accepted the arrangement, and it is likely to be permanent.

The whole texture of the poem of 'Ulysses' shines with gems of reminiscence. Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, each contributes to adorn a piece none the less original for its modulation into unexpected keys, of remembered harmonies. Music from afar thrills us in lines, the exquisite charm of which renews the youth of old beauties. Vital meanings develope in them; implications are divined and rendered obvious. Homer merely says that Ulysses suffered greatly; he was distinguished as much-enduring; the name 'Odysseus' is rooted in the significance of pain. Tennyson adjusts the balance by adding that he had enjoyed greatly,' and was minded to drink life to the lees; thus setting before us no passive victim of destiny, but one who resolutely chose the rapture of a strenuous existence with its inevitable alternations of poignant anguish. Altiora peto. No 'twilight ' of the gods' for him, but the sunshine and shadow of human vicissitudes.

Compare, again, Tennyson's 'rainy Hyades' with the 'pluviasque Hyadas' of the Æneid. Virgil uses the epithet conventionally; Tennyson conjures up the scene and season

when

'Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea.'

Those particular stars, it is true, had as little to do with wet weather as the Pleiades with the sailing season. The imputed connexion depended, in each case, upon an etymological misunderstanding. But this, from the poetical viewpoint, was of small consequence.

The Shakespearian Ulysses avers that

'to have done is to hang

Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery.'

The Tennysonian Ulysses exclaims :

'How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use,
As tho' to breathe were life!'

The superiority of the copy to its model is visible at a glance. Unmistakeably the simile of the disused armour has, in the latter passage, spread saffron wings.' It has assumed the perfect form destined for it. Such metamorphoses are not uncommon. Plagiarisms are often justified by their felicity. Who can blame the raising of an

immortal flower from an unpromising and neglected seed? Who would prohibit the fitting of the 'golden phrase' to some derelict coin of fancy'? Thus a pedestrian sentence of Boethius was glorified by Dante into the nightingalecadence of Francesca da Rimini's melancholy utterance :'Nessun maggior dolore.

Che ricordarsi del tempo felice

Nella miseria.'

And similar examples might be multiplied.

That the Odyssey should have found completion in the Divine Comedy is certainly one of the strangest facts in the history of literature. Dante, who never had the opportunity of surveying the Homeric edifice, laid most unexpectedly its coping-stones in their place. In so doing he unconsciously put the finishing touch to the Epic of Troy. No genuine addition was subsequently made to it. Ages had been required for its elaboration. Generation after generation of Hellenic and Hellenistic poets and poetasters had contributed to develope or decorate it. The great Roman singer gave it currency in the West; its vitality was prolonged by the fabrication of narratives adapted to the changing spirit of the Byzantine epoch. Finally, the trouveurs manipulated, with the license of medieval fancy, the varied themes it presented, one of which took, from Dante's transforming imagination, its consummate shape. The curtain drops upon the vision of Ulysses lifted to the empyrean region where man dies for an idea, yet tormented by his relentless Ghibelline master as having sinned against the nascent world-empire. The stage is cleared; the traditional characters of the ancient company give place to the dramatis persona of knightly romance. Then came the turn of the national and religious epos-of the 'Lusiads,' the 'Gerusalemme Liberata,' of Paradise Lost and Regained.' It looked forward as well as backward. It did not rest in the past which it celebrated. For the modern European nations were just waking to self-consciousness, and the stress of life was strong upon them. When it relaxed, and the glare and dust of struggle began to be dissipated, the morning of the world was perceived to have lost none of its dewy freshness, and the charm of the antique stories re-asserted itself. To the revival we owe the grace and melodious subtlety of Tennyson's 'Enone' and ' Ulysses.'