'Should the Right Honourable the Governor-General in Council, after what I have stated, persist in his intention of sending me to Europe, I request you will be pleased to inform him, that having, since my letter of the 13th instant, given indemnification to the two gentlemen who had become responsible for my appearance in the Supreme Court on the 25th of October, I am now as ready to comply with his requisition as I can be at any subsequent period; and that I cannot, in any case, think of troubling my friends to make themselves amenable for my conduct. 'With respect to the charter-party passage which the Right Hon. the Governor-General in Council has been pleased to propose for my wife, as that kind of passage is subject to inconveniences which I cannot permit her to share, I prefer the alternative of leaving her behind; and must, therefore, be permitted to decline the offer.I have the honour to be, Sir, your most obedient servant, 'CHARLES MACLEAN. [Attested Copy of Captain Hudson's Letter, enclosed in the above.] To Charles Maclean, Esq. 'SIR,-I am favoured with yours of yesterday; in answer thereto, I am ready to declare, that I understand the cause of your having quitted the Houghton, of which ship you were Surgeon, on her former voyage to Bengal, to have been entirely owing to indisposition, which rendered you unable to go on board; and, to the best of my knowledge, the official letter transmitted through the pilot to the Governor-General, was to that effect; and, therefore, if you were reported "run" on the ship's books, it must have been owing to mistake, which happened without my knowledge, and consequently, without any orders given to that effect by me. On this I shall be ready to afford the fullest explanation to any friend of yours in England; and I shall be happy to do any thing in my power to remove any difficulty or objection that may have occurred from any representation that may have been made, relative to the cause of your having quitted the Houghton, on her late voyage to Bengal. The Company's medical journal was continued on board the Houghton, by Mr. Carmichael, who acted as surgeon on the passage home. It was the same journal that had been begun by you, and was regularly signed by me, as commander of the ship.-I am, Sir, your most obedient servant, 'Calcutta, Nov. 23, 1797.' " ROBERT HUDSON. We must pause at this point, which embraces nearly all the correspondence that passed between the Government and Dr. Maclean on this occasion; and in our next we shall follow this up, by a transcript of Dr. Maclean's private journal, kept at the time, and never yet published, with the original of which we have been furnished by the writer himself, which will throw more light than even the correspondence itself upon the infamous proceedings of the Indian authorities. FOR EVER THINE.* FOR ever thine, whate'er this heart betide; 1 The world may wrong us, we will brave its hate; Whose spring-tide radiance has been wholly mine?- When gentle hearts to tenderest thoughts incline In courtly bowers; at Folly's gilded shrine ;- For ever thine, amid the boisterous crowd, ; Where the jest sparkles, with the sparkling wine; But drink to thee, in thought,-for ever thine! I would not, sweet, profane that silvery sound,- My thoughts, my thoughts are thine, for ever thine! Fate, that may rob us of all wealth beside, By Alaric A. Watts. From the Literary Souvenir, for 1828. ON THE POEMS attributed to HOMER. [Translated, for 'The Oriental Herald,' from the recent Work of M. Benjamin Constant.] THE famous problem of the identity of the author of the Iliad and Odyssey has found a new investigator in M. Benjamin Constant, the celebrated member of the French Chamber of Deputies. In his work on religion, of which a new volume has been recently published, on passing from the consideration of the polytheism of the heroic ages to the times of sacerdotal religion, he felt the necessity of giving some explanation of the religious system of the Greeks, such as it is presented in the works attributed to Homer; and he was thence led to the inquiry, whether the Iliad and Odyssey can be ascribed to the same poet; whether they do not rather belong to different epochs; and whether each of these poems, taken separately, is not in itself a collection of several distinct rhapsodies. The high reputation of the author, and the clear, elegant, and philosophical manner in which he has treated the subject, assure us that an extract of this portion of his work, which might form in itself a separate essay, will not be unacceptable to our readers : The religion of the Greeks of the heroic ages, such as we view it in the Iliad, says our author, lent no material aid to morality. A religious feeling, it is true, seemed struggling to introduce notions of humanity, of generosity, and of justice; but there existed a natural repulsion and variance between this feeling and the character of the system it sought to modify. It is otherwise in the Odyssey. In that work morality forms a very important part of religion. As early as the seventh line of the First Book, the companions of Ulysses are said to have, by their sins, precluded their return to their country; and if the principal crime they had committed was the slaughter of the herds of Apollo, which implies a feeling of personal interest on the part of the deity, yet the justice of the gods, in many other passages, is independent of their personal interest. Every sort of crime excites their indignation. Should I force my mother to quit the house,' says Telemachus, she would invoke the furies. Jupiter inflicts on the Greeks a disastrous voyage for their want of prudence and justice. The gods warn Ægisthus against assassinating Agamemnon, that he might espouse the widow of his victim; and when he has perpetrated the murder, they visit him with immediate punishment. Minerva approves this chastisement, and demonstrates the justice of it; and Jupiter adds, that Ægisthus has committed the crime in opposition to the destinies. This new point of view, also, in which men are forbidden to attribute to fate the consequences of their own errors, is an improvement on former ideas of morality. Minerva, again, Oriental Herald, Vol. 16, G in reproaching the gods for abandoning Ulysses, whom she protects, does not ground her mediation in his favour on the number of his sacrifices, but on the justice and gentleness of the hero. I will not detain thee by force,' said Alcinous to Ulysses; 'such an act would incur the displeasure of Jupiter. Were I to kill thee after I had made thee my guest, with what confidence could I address my prayers to the sovereign of the gods?' Telemachus, on several occasions, threatens the suitors with the celestial anger. Ulysses, on arriving among the Cyclops, sends to discover if the inhabitants of the island are kind to strangers, and fear the immortal protectors of the suppliant. This protection, it must be owned, is characteristic also of the Jupiter of the Iliad, but it belongs in a much higher degree to the supreme deity of the Odyssey. The former only concerns himself for those who implore him because they embrace his altars, and because his glory is interested in their safety; the second takes their cause in hand, because they are unarmed and defenceless. The gods of the Odyssey interfere, in their capacity of gods, in the transactions of man with man. They wander disguised about the world, to observe the deeds of the vicious and of the virtuous. In the Iliad, the excitements to their resentment are neglect of sacrifice, or insults offered to their priests. In the Odyssey, the crimes of man towards his fellow being, are the objects of their displeasure, and of their severity. In the Iliad, the gods confer on mortals strength, courage, prudence, cunning: in the Odyssey, they inspire them with virtue, which they reward with happiness. If in one solitary instance in the Odyssey, the suitors contem plate a murder without appearing to apprehend the disapprobation of the gods on account of it, until they are diverted from their project by a divine portent; this happens because every epoch in which new ideas are introduced, before those which formerly pre vailed are completely fallen into discredit, must be a period of contradictions. Besides, even in this instance, the gods themselves protest against this expectation of impunity, as derogatory to their celestial character. The suitors deemed that they were addressing the gods of the Iliad ;-the gods of the Odyssey reply to them. We might hazard the assertion, that a long interval had separated the gods of the two poems, and that during that interval their moral education had been advancing. The effects of religion must not be confounded with the use made of mythology in poetry. This use is, perhaps, less frequent in the Odyssey than in the Iliad; but the effects of religion, properly so called, are much more diversified in the former. In that poem, man is shown as having combined, in a much better manner, the means of rendering the gods not only propitious to individual interests, but useful to public order. The gods of the Odyssey possess a degree of dignity much more exalted than those of the Iliad. The description of Olympus in the former poem is more brilliant, the felicity of its inhabitants is more perfect. The dissensions before attributed to the gods, were the result of the observations of an infant people, struck by the disorders and irregularities of nature; these dissensions cease in proportion as men discover the secret order which pervades this apparent confusion. Thus the disputes of the gods, those disputes which occupy so much space in the Iliad, are hardly alluded to in the Odyssey; and when they are mentioned, they are drawn in a manner less defined, and of a milder character, Minerva dares not openly protect Ulysses, from the fear of giving offence to Neptune. The distance placed between the gods and men, is also much greater in the one than in the other of these poems. In the Iliad the gods are incessantly in action, and they all interfere. In the Odyssey, Minerva is almost the only divinity who appears. In the first, the gods act after the manner of men: they themselves strike the blows; they raise shouts which make the heavens and earth resound; they snatch from the hands of the warriors their broken weapons. In the other, Minerva operates only by secret inspirations, or at least in a mysterious and invisible manner. Instead of those combats, unworthy of the divine majesty, and which the bard of Achilles describes so complacently, the poet who celebrates Ulysses shows us but once only, and that as a mere tradition, and not as an action of the poem, a rash warrior defying Apollo; but here not even a struggle ensues,—the adversary of the god perishes resistless, he is rather chastised than conquered. In the Iliad, when the immortal gods desire to conceal themselves from human view, they are obliged to envelope themselves in a cloud; their nature is to be visible: the miracle consists in rendering themselves invisible. Often are they recognized in spite of their efforts at concealment. Minerva, when she descends from the skies, is perceived by both Greeks and Trojans; and Apollo, in order not to be seen by Patroclus, surrounds himself with a veil of dense obscurity. But in the Odyssey, Homer makes it impossible to recognize a god against his will. Thus, then, in this second epoch, it is the nature of the gods to be invisible: it is by an extraordinary exertion of their power that they make themselves seen. Thetis, in the Iliad, is constrained by Jupiter to espouse Peleus. In the Odyssey the gods disapprove the marriages of goddesses with mortals: the mixture of the two races appeared to them an unsuitable alliance. Jupiter forbids Calypso to espouse Ulysses; and with his thunderbolt destroys Jasion for having contracted with Ceres a too ambitious marriage. These differences in the two epic poems of Homer might furnish many objections to the picture we have drawn, in the preceding part of our work, of the first polytheism of Greece; but should they be |