of being sensible. We all fish for the good opinions of each other, some openly, some underhand. And I, for my part, am as willing to give my share to the person who stretches the hand out for it, as to the one who in sullen and coquettish pride awaits my proffer. What half the world calls affectation, is the most unsophisticated nature-the unrestrained indulgence of natural humour-the form in which the sapling shoots; it must be warped and bandaged to accurate straightness. The To PETOV-the acme of propriety-is the highest possible point of artificiality. If you be sceptical, reader, I appeal to your dancingmaster, whoever he may be, to bear me out. But all the old saws and philippics against learned ladies have become stale and invalid. There is no longer a chasm between learning and life-the essayists of the last century flung a bridge over it. The most abstract speculations, the most insignificant customs, were equal and welcome to them. All topics became blended, known, and discussed. The domain of knowledge was unenclosed, thrown into a common, and now the tripping step of the fair may as well stray over it as the dull plod of the university professor. The world and books are no longer at variance, they are one and the same thing, and there is not to be found between them that antithesis, which has been so much harped upon in the common-places of moral sentimentalists. A library is now a school of the world. And although there never were displayed more originality and liberty of opinion, yet it is not exclusive or pedantic; it is set in the key of human nature, and springs from the common source of vulgar and sound feeling. It is a complaint, that the world has grown tame, and hath a void in it; that it wants the marvels, the adventures, "the moving accidents by flood and field," the prominent ruggedness of character, and the strained heights of enthusiasm which it used to have. It is true, the workings of the mind are not now displayed in action,-we have too much an eye upon one another; -the sneer of the satirist has become more powerful than the lance of the champion. The objects of excitement have been transferred from the highway to the page: it is no longer to the breathless and open-mouthed story-teller that we listen, who had seen all with his own eyes; we must gather tidings from the formal page, and through it alone are conveyed the objects, feelings, and emotions, which we used to catch from the living scene of life. Hence print has become part of our existence-has superseded vulgar sight and fame; like to the air we breathe, it is the medium through which we receive sound and light, every idea, and every feeling,-beyond whose influence we cannot get, and could not live. To exclude the sex from books in early days was nothing, the volume of life was ample and open; but such a prohibition at this time of day is putting out a sixth sense,-depriving the mind of all knowledge and discernment. People used formerly to write with their pens, but now they talk with them. I have myself sat surrounded with the publications of the day,-dipping into them all, till I have imagined a thousand pens wagging like tongues, scolding, flattering, soliloquizing, dealing out lies, puns, and stories, so volubly, that I have been stunned with the imaginary noise, as though the apartment were a Babel. And are not women at home,-quite in their proper sphere in such a scene as this? Who will deny it? Y. LECTURE IV. Greek Poetry. THE fate of the surviving conquerors of Troy, whose thrones and dominions had been exposed to usurpation and violence during their absence, constituted an era in the history of Greece as eventful and as fruitful in traditions as the Trojan war itself. Those traditions, long after the time of Homer, were taken up by the Cyclic poets *; and we hear in particular of one work called the Noro, or returns (of the heroes from Troy), in which their histories were collectively embodied. In that work, as well as in Greek tragedy, princes were commemorated who were certainly of more importance to the general interests of Greece, than a chief whose dominions were so remote and insignificant as those of Ithaca. But still the name of Ulysses had great attractions for the best and oldest of poets, as the subject of a sequel to the tale of Troy. The maritime distance of his home justified a tissue of fabulous events, which could not have been consistently introduced in describing the return of a chief to any neighbouring shore of Greece. Even the poverty of his dominions bespoke an interest to the imagination, from their seeming less to invite his ambition than his local and domestic affections. It is true that Ulysses is a hero much more according to ancient than to modern taste. His sagacity is a little too subtle for our ideas of the sublime. Minerva herself rallies him with having been a cunning urchin in his childhood, and always expert at equivocation. But the goddess accuses him of this with so much goodhumour, as to shew that she was not displeased with it; and in judging of Fagan morality, we must make allowance for those circumstances of existence which rendered subtlety an almost necessary ingredient in human wisdom. If we consider too the trials through which Ulysses is feigned to pass, we shall conceive that the poet was bound, in consistency, to furnish him with a cautious as well as a hardy character. He loses his companions-he goes forth alone against the world-he has to break through supernatural dangers and allurements, to seek the only spot of earth that was sacred to his virtuous affections; and his head grows grey before he reaches There was a controversy even among the ancients respecting the exact range of works that were to be included under the name of Cyclic poetry; but the term, I think, is often used so widely as to be applicable to all the epic and narrative mythological poetry of ancient Greece subsequent to Homer and Hesiod. It comprehended a series of works, the titles of which are now almost their only remains, though their various subjects embraced a connected fabulous history of the world, from the marriage of the Earth and Heaven down to the siege of Troy, and even to the adventures of its returning besiegers.-See Heyne on the Second Æneid of Virgil. + Odyss. xiii. 291. it. Even with this great object at his heart, however, the traits of his circumspection and fortitude are not overcharged. His character is only generally marked by them. The poet was too natural to represent him as a mere abstraction of stoicism: on the contrary, he displays him making several very human-like aberrations both from virtue and prudence, forgetting himself at one time in the arms of Circe, till his crew are obliged to remind him of his wife and family; and on another occasion, indulging in very ill-timed merriment upon an angry giant, who is very near repaying his sarcasms by pelting his ship to the bottomt. His temper, however, upon the whole, has an impressive strength and serenity; nor is even his accustomed obduracy without its use in heightening the pathos of his situations. For when Ulysses is moved, our conception of what he feels is heightened by remembering the fortitude that gives way to his feelings; and the torrent of his sensations appears the deeper and stronger for the mass of resistance which it overcomes. His heart is not lightly susceptible, but, when it is touched, it is with earnest and long vibrations. Thus when his social affections are brought forth in the sunshine of Alcinous's hospitality, when he wraps himself up in his mantle, and surrenders himself, at the voice of poetry and music, to involuntary bursts of sensibility, or when he loses even his habitual patience at Penelope's scruples to recognize him, or when he meets his aged and fainting father in the garden, where he had sported in his childhood-his emotions amidst those scenes affect us doubly from our contrasting them with his self-command on other exquisitely trying occasions, where the poet describes him as looking with impassive eyes, "immovable as horn or steel." Whilst the Odyssey resembles the Iliad in its diction and descriptive manner, it opens an interesting variety in epic poetry. It concentrates our sympathy on fewer characters, its interest is less warlike and public, its concourse of agents is less magnificent, and its tone of action and feeling is less impetuous. On the other hand, it has the twofold charm of being at once the most familiar and the most fanciful of all ancient draughts of existence, abounding in the minutest traits of domestic manners, and at the same time teeming with a wildness of imagination, which, classical as the poem is, may be truly denominated romantic. Had the poet been equally disposed to have sported with the marvellous in the Iliad, the vicinity of the Troade to Greece would have been a check upon his fancy. But the scene of fiction was now to be shifted, and expanded over scenes that might be peopled at will with * Odyss. x. 473. + Odyss. ix. 481. an expression in the thrilling passage of the 19th book, (line 211.) where he suppresses his tears at the sight of those which Penelope sheds on hearing his name whilst he is in her presence, but before it is safe to make himself known. giants, enchanters, and semideities, or extended even to the shadowy empire of the dead. Homer has ventured into that darkest realm of fancy, the intrepid and long-distant precursor of Virgil and Dante. It would be unfair to compare a mere episode of the Odyssey with an entire fabric of poetry, which the last of those geniuses has devoted to the same subject. But Homer's world of death has its sublimity, though more simple than that of the Florentine poet. He gives expressiveness to human character even in delineating its spectral shade. Tiresias first rises to Ulysses, and awfully reveals to him the will of Heaven. Ajax retains his obstinacy beyond the grave. The visitant of hell conjures him to forgive their earthly qnarrel, and declares with much weeping that he repents of his triumph. But Ajax spurns all his tears and intreaties, and paces back indignantly into the gloom.* Achilles's soul is still impassioned amidst the dead. He demands if his sire be respected in the world above, and taking fire even before he is answered, at the bare imagination of his aged father being insulted, wishes but for a moment of life in his native mansion, that he might shew an arm to make the fiercest of his enemies tremble. He next inquires for his son, and when informed that he had become a hero, exults with joy, and measures the meadows of asphodel with a larger stride. The most touching apparition in this scene of the Odyssey is the hero's motherUlysses would weep upon her neck, but she is a spirit, and cannot be embraced-he questions her by what death she had died, and she replies, "I died, my son, of no other death than of grief for thy departure from Ithaca." There is scarcely any conception of the supernatural that belongs to romantic poetry, some original germ of which may not be found in the Odyssey. Perhaps the light and elegant generation of fairies are the only very poetical beings which Romance has added from an unclassical stock to her visionary empire. It has been sometimes alleged, indeed, that even their prototypes may be traced in the pigmies of antiquity; but our fays, upon the whole, would seem to be of a mixed descent from the elves of Scandinavian and the Peris of Eastern mythology; and it must certainly be owned, that in wit and accomplishments, and, above all, in their taste for dancing, music, and moonlight scenery, the well-bred fairies of the middle age are quite a cultivated people compared with the Heathen pigmies. Classical poetry is, in general, too justly to be charged with deficiency in that refined and delicate bloom of female character which gives a charm to modern life, by exalting sensation into sentiment. But that tone of classical gallantry which is not degrading to wo A passage closely copied by Virgil in the description of " fugit indignata sub umbras," applied to Dido at the sight of Eneas. |
