from his eye into my very soul, as though he would see whether I had detected the process of thought which had passed through his mind," you look surprised-ha, ha !-and well you may! But now I'll explain the riddle. You must know that Lord is expecting to be our new ambassador, and in fact I must offer it him; but-but-I wish to pique him into declining it, when I'll take offence-by-by telling him-hinting carelessly, that one of my friends had the prior refusal of it!"" Did not the promptitude and plausibility of this pretext savour of madness? He hinted soon after that he had much business in hand, and I withdrew. I fell back in my carriage, and resigned myself to bitter and agonizing reflections on the scene I had just quitted. What was to be done? Mr Stafford, by some extra vagant act, might commit himself frightfully with public affairs. Lady Emma, painful as the task was, must be written to. Measures MUST now be had recourse to. The case admitted of no farther doubt. Yes-this great man must be put into constraint, and that immediately. In the tumult of my thoughts, I scarce knew what to decide on; but at last I ordered the man to drive to the houses of Sir, and Dr ——, and consult with them on the proper course to be pursued. SOTHEBY'S Homer. CRITIQUE II. READER, beautiful or brave! lend us your ears, while again we seek to hold with you converse high about old Homer and the Heroic Age. These are mechanical times in which we live; those knew no machinery but of the gods. Now, Science, the son of Intellect, is sole sovereign; then, the Muses, daughters of Memory, queenlike reigned on earth. Three thousand years ago, Rhapsodists roamed o'er continent and isle -all last summer we saw not so much as a poetical pedlar. Reason is our idol now-we bow down to it, and worship it; and Imagination, though she still have a dwelling-place in the world of Poetry, has been banished from life. We, however, the Magicians, hold by another creed. We rejoice in being we shall not say how farbehind the age in which, nevertheless, we flourish. The president of a mechanic's institution, in the suburbs of a hardware town, does not seem to us the beau ideal of humanity. The schoolmaster who is now often abroad-when he ought to be at home-is less an object of our admiration than many an unlettered swain who lived before Cadmus. We can see much to rejoice in, throughout the ongoings even of that life, "When wild in woods the noble savage ran ;" but then it is that our hearts burn within us, when that barbarian, "The blind old man of Scio's rocky isle," brings before our eyes a whole host of barbarians, some of them "dark with excessive bright"-Agamemnon and Achilles-for specimen or example-who, glaring on that Devoted City, had pitched their innumerous tents by the sounding sea. Yes-all the heroes of that age were but barbarians; and so must have been the divinities they worshipped, and from whose "shining loins" some of them had strongly sprung. The high-browed Maid vainly imagined the Goddess of Wisdom was but a barbarian ; though the delight of heaven and earth-no better was Venus; nor Juno, when to the smiles of Jove she "Roll'd the large orbs of her majestic eyes!" And what else was Jove himself, with his knowing knack of nodding, &c., but the barbarian king of a barbarian heaven? Or Apollo, nathless his celestial beauty, the far-shooting god? Barbarians like themselves too, were all their messengers and all their ministers. Witness, in particular, those two-Hebe, the Morn-faced, and Iris, the Rainbow. Then their language! Look at it in their own Ados-and you pity alike the poor gods and men, when you think that the best among them went gabbling to their graves, or, more melancholy still, as they thought to all eternity-something they chose to call Greek! Yes, yes, yes, it is well known now to the very braziers of Birmingham that they were all barbarians. Vulcan could not have shewn his face at Sheffield-all the smiths would have smiled sardonically at the Shield he fashioned for the Son of Thetis, and called it a clumsy concern. What was Argive Helen at her Sidonian loom, in the palace of Alexander the Fair in statefy-structured Troy, to a spinningjenny in a manufactory at Salford? Still, why oh why! with all the scorn expressed by this civilized age, of that age of barbarians, continue men inconsistently still to talk of the "tale of Troy divine?" And how happens it that on the shoulders of shifting Savoyards you see, among a host of heads hoisted along through the streets of all the cities, conspicuous in the very centre, the most awful of them all, the head of old Homer? But no more prosing; let us come at once to our predestined Selections from Sotheby and other worthies, who have striven in spirit with the strength, stateliness, and solemnity, or in spirit delivered themselves up to the softness, sweetness, sadness, for in all these different delights is it indeed divine,-of the Sixth Book of the Iliad. We have sat at the knees of Professor Young, looking up to his kindling or shaded countenance, while that "old man eloquent" gave life to every line, till Hector and Andromache seemed to our imagination standing side by side beneath a radiant rainbow glorious on a showery heaven-such, during his inspiration, was the creative power of the majesty and the beauty of their smiles and tears. That was long, long ago, in the Greek class of the College of Glasgow; and though that bright scholar's Greek was Scotch Greek, and in all its vowels and diphthongs, and some of its consonants too, especially that glorious guttural that sounds in lochs, all unlike the English Greek that soon afterwards, beneath the shadow of Magdalen Tower, the fairest of all Oxford's stately structures, was poured mellifluous on our delighted ear from the lips of President Routh, the Erudite and the Wise,-still hath the music of that "repeated strain" a charm to our souls, remembering us of "life's morning march when our spirits were young," and when we could see, even as with our bodily eyes, things far away in space or time, and Troy hung visibly before us, even as the sun-setting clouds. Therefore till death shall we love the Sixth Book of the Iliad; and if we understand it not, then indeed has our whole life been vainer than the shadow of a dream. During Four Books earth and heaven have been tumulted by battles. But now there is a pause in the Fight -a priest-imposed pause-for Helenus, you know, is the chief Augur of Troy, the metropolitan Bishop, Blomfield and Howley in one, and he has commanded Hector to return to the city, in order to appoint a solemn procession of the Queen and the Trojan matrons to the Temple of Minerva, to entreat her to remove from the field the dreadful Diomed. Hector obeys leaps from his car-vibrating his spears, slays the Greeks-and exhorting the Trojans, and their " farcalled far-famed allies," to stand firm till his return from Troy, as Homer and Sotheby tell us― "Around him, passing from the battlefield, Cast the circumference of his bossy shield, Whose sable border, as he forward sprang, Clashed on his neck, and on his ankles rang." Behold, now, reader heroic or heroine, the two Battles lowering aloof, beneath the very walls, with but a short green space between-a stately stage, is it not, for the representation of some high drama? The whole house is thrown into the pit, and both armies can see and hear to a man. Overhead are the aerial galleries, filled with the gods. And should Jove thunder, the flash and the crash of his electricity will be something superior to either John Dennis' or Harry Brougham's, though neither of them, in its way, is much amiss; bear witness in a thousand bottles the sudden sourness of much small-beer. No need for Jupiter, when he brandishes his bolts, to cry, "that's my thunder!" Who then shall dare, "insupportably their steps advance," to enact their swelling parts on such a stage? Well-graced actors must they be, whose prattle shall not be tedious; and lo! Diomed, second only to Achilles, to represent the Greeks; and for the Trojans, Glaucus, no sorry substitute for Hector-men of deeds both, as well as words; with them 'tis a word and a blow-the blow first, and sheer smite their swords, like lightning the oak-splitter. Diomed, fierce, fiery, and furious, is like Edmund Kean-Glaucus, dignified in his dreadfulness, reminds us of the late John Kemble. Nor deem that these similitudes sink the grandeur of the scene or of its actors; for Kean, had he fought at Troy, small as he is, would have been a sweeping swordsman; and Kemble, with a pair of spears, would have been a fearful and an effulgent form. This is far from being their first appearance on any stage; and their parts have always been in deepest tragedy. Stars are they-and never have they acted to empty houses, save to those themselves have thinned, making "lanes through largest families," like hurricanes through corn or trees. Silence! The play is going to begin; for hark! a solitary trumpet-blown by Sotheby-given to his hand by Homer. "Now Glaucus' spirit, and Tydides' rage, But ere they clash'd in arms, stroke threat'ning stroke, 6 Who art thou, bravest chief? now first beheld- Who warr'd against the gods, soon past from earth. Is not that noble? Nor need you much lament, here, that you cannot read the original, if so it be that, like Shakspeare, you " have no Greek;" for Sotheby is here of himself sufficient to raise your spirit to the height of noblest daring, breathing deliberate valour, as you turn your wondering eyes towards that other hero who, Diomed thought, might be a god. So see and hear Glaucus. HOMER. Τὸν δ' αυθ' Ιππολόχοιο προσηύδα φαίδιμος υἱός. Οἵη περ φύλλων γενεή, τοιήδε καὶ ἀνδρῶν. Φύλλα τὰ μέν τ' ἄνεμος χαμάδις χέει, αλλά δε θ' ὕλη Τηλεθόωσα φύει, έαρος δ' ἐπιγίγνεται ὥρη 6 POPE. "What, or from whence I am, or who my sire,' Whence, from what race I sprung, and who my sire? Autumnal gales here strew with leaves the plain, same thought may be found in Ecclesiastes, almost in the same words, Of these three fine translations of one of the most beautiful, because Bible-like, passages in ancient poe-as of the green leaves on a thick try, Sotheby's is, we think, on the whole, the finest; yet is the original better than them all-because more Bible-like. Pope felt the passage when he said, "there is a noble gravity in the beginning of this speech of Glaucus, according to the true style of antiquity. Few and evil are our days.' This beautiful thought of our author, whereby the race of man are compared to the leaves of trees, is celebrated by Simonides, in a fine fragment extant in Stobæus. The tree, some fall and some grow, so in the generations of flesh and blood, one cometh to an end, and another is born."" Pope then says, that the reader, who has seen so many passages imitated from Homer by succeeding poets, will no doubt be pleased to see one of an ancient poet which Homer has here imitated; this is a fragment of Musæus preserved by Clemens Alexandrinus, in his Stromata: Ἡ δ ̓ αὕτως και φυλλα φυει ζείδωρος άρερα Who, where, and when, was Musæus? All of him but his shining name, we fear, is in oblivion. He was not, as Pope thought, anterior to Homer. For while you read Homer, always remember, as Dr Blair and Mr Henry Nelson Coleridge have told us, that the Iliad is the oldest poetry save that of the Bible. But if it were not, no body need steal leaves-or images of leaves. For we all see, hear, feel, and know, that they are our brethren. Life is a tree-and when all its sap is dry, and the last leaf, alias the last man, has dropt sere from its last withered branch, then will the old trunk itself be flung into the final fire. It is pleasant to hear Pope speak ing in such a true spirit of the Scriptural simplicity of the old poem. Nor has he here failed in embuing with it his own sounding strain, although not to the degree one might have hoped and expected from the fine feeling of his illustrations. He makes another remark on this passage, which points out in it a peculiar beauty-a beauty appropriate to the person who utters it. Though the passage, he says, be justly admired for its beauty in this obvious application to the mortality and succession of human life, it seems, however, designed by the poet in this place as a proper emblem of the transitory state, not of man, but of families, which being, by their misfortunes or follies, fallen or decayed, do again, in a happier season, revive and flourish in the fame and virtues of their posterity. In this sense, it is a direct answer to what Diomed had asked, as well as a proper preface to what Glaucus relates of his own family, which, having been extinct in Corinth, had recovered new life in Lycia. Cowper has attempted intense literalness-and has succeeded, perhaps, as far as success was possible. A slight tinge of beauty is all his version wants to be perfect. Sotheby's verses have that tingenot a slight one-of beauty; yet are they not perfect-because not intensely literal-like Cowper's. In Homer, the similitude of men to leaves is given in one line, and illustrated in three. The one line-as good a one as ever was written-is the text, the other three are the sermon; and 'tis a better sermon (independently of its shortness) than any (however long) that we have heard on the subject since Christmas, or indeed before it. But Sotheby confuses text and sermon-and that is a flaw in the integrity of his translation. Else, 'tis a sweet and solemn discourse of most excellent music. But how now? What is this? Homer's last line is, as it ought to be, a practical conclusion, almost in the words of the text, introduced by an impressive s. changes suddenly, and without warning, and without temptation-nay, in the face of all temptation-into a Christian philosopher, which the son of Seven was not, nor yet the son of David, and says "Thus change the vital tides, wave follows wave, Here life, there death, the cradle and the grave!" These are fine lines-not weeds, but flowers-yet they "have no busi ness there" on men's tombs. Was the spirit of Sotheby not satisfied with the image shewn it by Homer? What alliance, in such inspired melancholy mood, between the budding, blowing, fading, and falling of leaves, and the change of vital tides, and the following of waves on waves? None. Besides, in itself, the "change of vital tides" is not a good expression. but faintly and obscurely tells of ebb and flow. While, It "Here life, there death, the cradle and the grave!" though fine in itself, is another new image still-or, rather, two new images. And we doubt if the latter, "cradle and the grave," be Homeric, or indeed Greek at all. A Christian grave is, even in shape, like a Christian cradle, only it has no rocking keel-it creaks not, and is still; but a heathen, or pagan cradle, we suspect, was most unlike a heathen or pagan grave; and indeed it may be asked, did a cradle ever swing to and fro, or motionless contain the infant Diomed or Glaucus? Or did they not lie in the same bed with the mother, or nurse, sprawling and squalling to the disturbance of deepbreasted dames who flourished long before the invention of those small infantine dormitories, which even the very imps of the heroic ages would have despised? What does old Chapman make of this famous simile? See, Why dost thou so explore,' Said Glaucus, of what race I am? When like the race of leaves The race of man is; that deserves no question; nor receives "Lus ardeŵr geven, i μèv púss, ǹ do My being any other breath. The wind in ἀπολήγει. But Sotheby, who hitherto has been as simply and severely Scriptural almost as Homer or Solomon, VOL. XXIX. NO. CLXXX. autumn strowes Th' earth with old leaves; then the spring the woods with new endowes; And so death scatters men on earth; so life puts out again 2 H |