1

and magnificent name, this natural patent of presidency to the Athenian hustings? It startles us to find, lurking in any man's name, a prophecy of his after career; as, for instance, to find a Latin legend · And his glory shall be from the Nile,' (Est honor à Nilo,) concealing itself in the name Horatio Nelson.22 But there the prophecy lies hidden, and cannot be extracted without a painful cork-screw process of anagram. Whereas, in Demosthenes, the handwriting is plain to every child: it seems witchcraft — and a man is himself alarmed at his own predestinating name. Yet for all that, with Mr. Ilgen's permission, Demosthenes was not an abstract idea.' Consequently, had Homer brought his name in his waistcoat pocket to the composition of the Iliad, he would still not have been half as mythical in appearance as several well-authenticated men, decent people's sons, who have kicked up an undeniable dust on the Athenian hustings. Besides, Homer has other significant or symbolizing senses. It means a hostage; it means a blind man, as much as a cabinet-maker, or even as a packer of trunks. Many of these significant names' either express accidents of birth commonly recurring, such as Benoni, The child of sorrow,' a name frequently given by young women in Westmoreland to any child born under circumstances of desertion, sudden death, &c. on the part of the father; or express those qualities which are always presumable, Honor, Prudence, Patience, &c., as common female names: or, if they imply anything special, any peculiar determination of general qualities that never could have been foreseen, in that case they must be referred to an admiring posterity — that

6

senior posterity which was such for Homer, but for us has long ago become a worshipful ancestry.

From the name it is a natural step to the country. All the world knows, by means of a satirical couplet, that

'Seven cities claimed the mighty Homer dead,

Through which the living Homer begged his bread.'

What were the names of these seven citics, (and islands,) we can inform the reader by means of an old Latin couplet amongst our schoolboy recollections

Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, Athenæ, Orbis de patriâ certat, Homere, tuâ.'

Among these the two first, Smyrna and Chios, have very superior pretensions Had Homer been passed to his parish as a vagrant, or had Colophon (finding a settlement likely to be obtained by his widow) resolved upon trying the question, she would certainly have quashed any attempt to make the family chargeable upon herself. Smyrna lies under strong suspicion; the two rivers from which Homer's immediate progenitors were named the Maon and the Meles· bound the plains near to Smyrna. And Wood insists much upon the perfect correspondence of the climate in that region of the Levant with each and all of Homer's atmospherical indications. We suspect Smyrna ourselves, and quite as much as Mr. Wood; but still we hesitate to charge any local peculiarities upon the Smyrniote climate that could nail it in an action of damages. Gay and sunny, pellucid in air and water, we are sure that Smyrna is; in short, everything that could be wished by the public in general, or by currant dealers in particular. But really that any city

whatever, in that genial quarter of the Mediterranean, should pretend to a sort of patent for sunshine, we must beg to have stated in a private letter ‘to the Marines' us it will not suit.

Meantime these seven places are far from being all the competitors that have entered their names with the clerk of the course. Homer has been pronounced a Syrian, which name in early Greece of course included the Jew; and so, after all, the Iliad may have issued from the synagogue. Babylon, also, dusky Babylon, has put in her claim to Homer; so has Egypt. And thus, if the poet were really derived from an Oriental race, his name (sinking the aspiration) may have been Omar. But those Oriental pretensions are mere bubbles, exhaling from national vanity. The place which, to our thinking, lies under the heaviest weight of suspicion as the seat of Homer's connections, and very often of his own residence, is the island of Crete. Smyrna, we doubt not, was his birthplace. But in those summer seas, quiet as lakes, and basking in everlasting sunshine, it would be inevitable for a stirring animated mind to float up and down the Egean. Home-keeping youths had ever homely wits,' says a great poet of our own; and we doubt not that Homer had a yacht, in which he visited all the festivals of the Egean Islands. Thus he acquired that learned eye which he manifests for female beauty. Rosy-fingered,' silver-footed,'full-bosomed,'' oxeyed,' with a large vocabulary of similar notices, show how widely Homer had surveyed the different chambers of Grecian beauty; for it has happened through acci dents of migration and consequent modifications of origin, combined with varieties of diet and customs, that

the Greek Islands still differ greatly in the style of their female beauty.28 Now, the time for seeing the young women of a Grecian city, all congregated under the happiest circumstances of display, was in their local festivals. Many were the fair Phidiacan24 forms which Homer had beheld moving like goddesses through the mazes of religious choral dances. But at the islands of Ios, of Chios, and of Crete, in particular, we are satisfied that he had a standing invitation. To this hour, the Cretan life delights us with the very echo of the Homeric delineations. Take four several cases:

I. — The old Homeric superstition, for instance, which connects horses by the closest sympathy, and even by prescience, with their masters that superstition which Virgil has borrowed from Homer in his beautiful episode of Mezentius still lingers unbroken in Crete. Horses foresee the fates of riders who are doomed, and express their prescience by weeping in a human fashion. With this view of the horse's capacity it is singular, that in Crete this animal by preference should be called to aloyov, the brute or irrational creature. But the word innos has, by some accident, been lost in the modern Greek. As an instance both of the disparaging name, and of the ennobling superstition, take the following stanza from a Cretan ballad of 1825:

• Upon which he mounted, and his horse wept: and then he saw clearly how this should bode his death.'

Under the same old Cretan faith, Homer, in Il. xvii.

437, says

Λάκρυα δε σφι

Θερμα κατα βλεφάρων χαμάδις δε μυρομενοιῖν

Ηνιόχοιο ποθη.

'Tears, scalding tears, trickled to the ground down the eyelids of them, (the horses,) fretting through grief for the loss of their charioteer.'

II. Another almost decisive record of Homer's familiarity with Cretan life, lies in his notice of the agrimi, a peculiar wild goat, or ibex, found in no part of the Mediterranean world, whether island or mainland, except in Crete. And it is a case almost without a parallel in literature, that Homer should have sent down to all posterity, in sounding Greek, the most minute measurement of this animal's horns, which measurement corresponds with all those recently examined by English travellers, and in particular with three separate pairs of these horns brought to England about the year 1836, by Mr. Pashley, the learned Mediterranean traveller of Trinity College, Cambridge. Mr. Pashley has since published his travels, and from him we extract the following description of these shy but powerful animals, furnished by a Cretan mountaineer: The agrimia are so active, that they will leap up a perpendicular rock of ten to fourteen feet high. They spring from precipice to precipice; and bound along with such speed, that no dog would be able to keep up with them even on better ground than that where they are found. The sportsman must never be to windward of them, or they will perceive his approach long before he comes within musket-shot.