ligion; and he ennobles their reconcilement by the sublimity of the fiction in which the "truth severe is expressed, and shadowed forth the moral providence of Heaven.

But, elevated as is the mood in which Achilles converses with the father of Hector, they both feel as men; and the peculiar character and passion of each breaks out suddenly in the midst of that divine dialogue. Priam, though calmed by the pouring out of his own sorrow, and by the sympathy of the "Lord of Fears," is all at once seized on by a longing to see, and to receive, and to embrace the dead body of his son. “Do not at all make-me-to-sit-down on a seat, Jove-nourished one! in so long as Hector lies uncared-for-in the tent; but quick as possible ransomed-restore-him, that with these eyes may behold him; and do thou receive the ransom magnificent, which we bring to thee; and mayst thou enjoy it, and return to thy fatherland!" "Him, the swift-footed Achilles, sternly eyeing, addressed,—' Provoke me no more, old man! I myself purpose ransomed-to-restore Hector!'"

I

And yet this finest touch and trait of nature has been found fault with by the critics! "I believe every reader," says Wakefield, "must be surprised, as I confess I was, to see Achilles fly out into so sudden a passion, without any apparent reason for it." He then explains the proper meaning of the passage. "Priam, perceiving that his address had mollified the heart of Achilles, takes this opportunity to persuade him. to give over the war, and return home, especially since his anger was sufficiently satisfied by the fate of Hector. Immediately Achilles took fire at this proposal, and answers: 'Is it not enough that I have restored thy son? Ask no more, lest I retract that resolution!' In this view we see a natural reason for the sudden passion of Achilles." This is very bad. It represents Priam as cunning and crafty even in his distraction; and why should he have desired a cessation of the war? All his sons were dead-Hector and all-and yet so fond was he of life, so tenacious of his throne, that he took this favourable opportunity of eliciting a promise from Achilles to spare Troy!

Achilles did not "fly into a sudden passion." But as Cowper, on the whole, well says, he was "mortified to see his gene

rosity, after so much kindness shown to Priam, still distrusted,

and that the impatience of the old king threatened to deprive him of all opportunity of doing gracefully what he could not be expected to do willingly." He was about to do it willingly; for Thetis had told him, that such was the will of Jove. But a sudden flash of memory came across him-and he said, "No more arouse thou my soul in its sorrows." Achilles, all his life long—at least all through the Iliad-took his own way in all things; and he could not bear to be baffled in his own mode of mercy, even by the unhappy father of the prince whose body he was about-ransomed to restore.

ΜΗΝΙΝ ἄειδε, Θεὰ, Πηληϊάδεω Αχιλῆος.

แ

But an end to all criticism-alike of others and our ownon the immortal interview. That was the last cloud that passed across the countenance of Achilles. "The son of Peleus from the house (tent) like a lion sprung forth." Yes, like a lion-though it was to order in the herald- to take from the beautifully-polished car the unbounded ransom of Hector's head"-to enjoin the women to wash the corpse apart from Priam, that the passionate old man might not, by giving sudden vent to his agony, provoke him (Achilles, who knew well his own WRATH) "to slay the king, and violate the behests of Jove❞—and to lift it with his own hands up upon the bier on the car that was to convey it to Troy. In the tenderest offices of humanity to the living and to the dead, aware of the danger of his own fiery spirit! In self-knowledge, if not in self-control-a philosopher-and a hero.

ΜΗΝΙΝ ἄειδε, Θεὰ, Πηληϊάδεω Αχιλῆος." That Wrath has now blazed its last, yet even in its ashes live its wonted fires;" and he asks forgiveness of Patroclus, that even now, and thus, has been quenched his Revenge. "But large, O beloved Shade! hath been the ransom-nor shalt thou not receive thereof thy due even in Hades." Now all in the Tent shall be perfect peace. Priam must partake of the repast. Famished is the Woe-begone, but he must eat and drink- -even as Niobe did in the midst of all her dead children. "Then indeed did the Dardanian chief gaze-withadmiration on Achilles, how large, and what kind he was (his stature and beauty); for he seemed in presence like the gods: And Achilles gazed with admiration on the Dardanian

Priam, contemplating his benevolent countenance, and listening to his words!" They retire to sleep-Priam on a couch graciously provided for him by the "great lord" in a place safe from all intrusion of the Greeks, that he may take his departure without an eye to see him-early in the morning, with the body of his son, to Troy; Achilles in the bosom of Briseïs, wherein not often will the hero lay his head,—for we remember the dying words of Hector,

“Phœbus and Paris shall avenge my fate,

And stretch thee here, before the Scaan gate."

HOMER AND HIS TRANSLATORS.

CRITIQUE VI. THE ODYSSEY.

[JANUARY 1834 ]

THE Iliad was written by Homer. Will Wolf and Knight tell us how it happened that all the heroic strains about the war before Troy, poured forth, as they opine, by many bards, regarded but one period of the siege? By what divine felicity was it that all those sons of song, though apart in time and place, united in chanting the wrath of Achilles? The poem is one-like a great wood, whose simultaneous growth overspreads a mountain. Indeed, one mighty poem, in process of time, moulded into form out of separate fragments, composed by a brotherhood of bards-not even coeval -may be safely pronounced an impossibility in nature.

Achilles was not the son of many sires; nor was the part he played written for him by a succession of "eminent hands," all striving to find fit work for their common hero. He is not a creature of collected traditions. He stands there -a single conception-in character and in achievement; his absence is felt like that of a thunder-cloud withdrawn behind a hill, leaving the air still sultry; his presence is as the lightning in sudden illumination glorifying the whole field of battle. Kill, bury, and forget him, and the Iliad is no more an Epic.

No two men at the same time ever yet saw a ghost; because a ghost is an Eidolon begotten by the imagination on the air of night, or some night-like day, and is visible but to his own frightened father. Now, Achilles was an Apparition; and his seer was a blind old man, with a front like Jove's, and a forehead like Olympus. "All power was given him in that dreadful trance; " and Beauty and Terror accompanied the

Destroyer. He haunted Homer, who no longer knew that he had himself created the sublimest of all Phantoms. But the Muse gave the maker command over his creature; and, at the waving of his hand, the imaginary Goddess-born came and went obedient, more magnificent than any shadowy form that at the bidding of sunlight stalks along mountains into an abysm of clouds.

The Odyssey also and likewise-was written by Homer, and the proof lies all in one word-Ulysses. There he is -the self-same being as in the Iliad, and the birth of one brain. Had Homer died the day he said, "And thus they celebrated the obsequies of Hector the Tamer-of-Horses, before no mortal eye would have stood on the threshold of his own hall, pouring out from his quiver all the arrows at his feet, that vision of a ragged beggar, suddenly transfigured into an Avenger more glorious far than Apollo's self transfixing the Python, for Lartiades stretched along his ancestral floor the whole serpent brood.

The opening of the Iliad is very simple-and so is the opening of the Odyssey; and both openings are, you will agree with us in thinking, sublime. In the one you are brought in a moment into the midst of heaven-sent death threatening the annihilation of a whole host; and, in pacifying Apollo, Agamemnon incenses Achilles, whose wrath lowers calamity almost as fatal as the visitation of the Plague. Men's minds are troubled-there is debate of doom in Heaven-nation is enraged against nation-and each trusts to its auxiliar gods. In the other there is no din below-the earth is silent-and you hear not the sea. Corn grows where Troy-Town stood-and you feel that Achilles is dust. All the chiefs who fought there and fell not, as Sotheby solemnly says

"At home once more

Dwell free from battle and the ocean roar

and there is an almost melancholy peace. There is mysterious mention of shipwreck on account of sin-and one guiltless and great Survivor is spoken of and then named—who is to take the place in our imaginations of all the other heroes living or dead-affectingly named-for he has been and is to be a Sufferer" All but Ulysses!" And shall the Celestial Synod care for that One Man! Ay, Minerva says to Jove,