found to extend to other objects besides those of religion, instead of embarrassing the question, they would solve it: since they would indicate a change in the social state, which would explain that of the religious system.

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Let us examine the Odyssey under this point of view. It displays then, as it appears to us, the commencement of a period tending to a pacific character: we perceive in it the earliest attempts at legislation, the first efforts of commerce, the primitive establishment of relations of friendship and interest between people, substituting for brutal force, transactions of reciprocal accord, and for conquest and violent spoliations, exchanges by mutual consent,

The rising of the people of Ithaca against Ulysses, after the slaughter of the suitors, discloses a germ of republicanism, and an appeal to the rights of the people against their chiefs, principles found subsequently more fully developed in the works of Hesiod!

One of the traits which characterises the Odyssey, is a certain curiosity a thirst for those sorts of knowledge whose existence is a proof of times of repose and leisure, the dawn of which had begun to show itself.

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Ulysses is held up to us as one who had learnt much, and who had observed the manners of many people. He prolongs his travels, and braves a thousand perils, for the sake of acquiring knowledge. The praise of science is often repeated, and this sentiment we find incorporated in the very fables. Atlas, the father of Calypso, bearing on his shoulders the pillars which separate the skies from the earth, is acquainted with what the depths of the sea contain. Calypso herself gives to Ulysses lessons of astronomy, and the Syrens are rẻpresented as seducing, principally because their songs are instructivė. To satisfy this thirst for a knowledge of the wonders of foreign lands, the author of the Odyssey collects from all parts the fabulous recitals of travellers, and inserts them in his poem. Hence we have his Circe, the more simple model of Armida and Alcina; his Cyclops, connected with mythology by their descent from Neptune; and his Lestrygones, of whom the traces are to be found in the fragments of the first Greek historians.

These characters are manifest signs of the epoch in which mankind, as yet sufficiently youthful to allow their imagination full scope, and sufficiently infantine to believe any thing, is yet advanced to the age for desiring to know every thing; an epoch clearly posterior to that of the Iliad, in which the Greeks, occupied with the immediate interests of their own life, and consuming their strength in attack and defence, scarcely looked beyond themselves.

The condition of the women, whose state ever keeps pace with civilization, is described as quite differently in the Odyssey and, in the Iliad. Areta, the wife of Alcinous, exercises an influence the most complete over her husband, and the subjects of her husband. The delicate modesty of Nausicaa, and her refined sensibility, imply

a state of society far advanced towards perfection. The fear which she expresses of pronouncing the word 'marriage' in her father's presence, her description of the scandal, and, if we may be allowed the expression, of the gossip of the Pheacians, in the sight of whom she would not venture through the town with a stranger, betoken a nice and refined attention to the relations of society in a pacific and civilized country.

Homer, it may be said, having to paint the Pheacians, a commercial nation, has skilfully brought forward the peculiarities which would distinguish the manners of such a people from the warlike habits of Greece. But in the Iliad, also, Homer had to describe a people more civilized, and less exclusively warlike than his fellow-countrymen, yet he never views this advance in the social condition but on its dark side; he ever speaks of the Trojans as an effeminate race. On the contrary, it is with approbation and satisfaction that the Pheacian civilization is described in the Odyssey. The admiration, or rather the surprise, shown by the Homer of the Iliad, at the luxury which reigned in Troy, is that of a man as yet a stranger to such a degree of luxury; but the bard of Ulysses shows himself habituated to it; he appreciates and admires it.

The end of the sixth book of the Iliad, the parting of Andromache and Hector, affords the only instance in which conjugal love is painted in touching colours; but even here the picture is that of conjugal love in despair, surrounded by all the horrors of war, a prey to all the agitation of a situation without resource, and not of a domestic happiness, the consequence of order and tranquillity guaranteed by the laws. In the Odyssey, the prudent Penelope, in the midst of her grief, manages her household, and only gives loose to her complaints, when, after having shared the labour of her women, and attended to all her domestic duties, she enters her solitary apartment to bathe with tears the nuptial couch. And let it be remarked, also, that with the exception of this Penelope, all the Greek women of the heroic ages, Eriphyle, Helen, Clytemnestra, Phædra, are represented as guilty of assassination, of treason, of adultery. Penelope is the transition from this state of violence and barbarity, to one more moral, more mild, and consequently of later date than that of which it is the substitute. Euryclea herself, that faithful nurse and watchful guardian, proves, by the respect with which she is treated, although in an inferior station of life, the consideration enjoyed by women in the state of society of the Odyssey. Helen, who, in the Iliad, contents herself with lamenting her crimes and committing fresh ones, appears in the other Epopee, with a dignity which makes her errors forgotten.

To prove that the condition of the women had not changed during the interval of the two poems, may be cited, perhaps, the occupation of the female captives, and the imperious discourse of Telemachus to his mother, a discourse which has been advanced as

a proof of the subordinate condition of the Greek women. But in this case the meaning of four verses, dictated evidently by extraordinary circumstances, has been very much exaggerated. Telemachus, incited by Minerva, who on quitting him gave him room to divine that a goddess had appeared to him, desires to leave Ithaca unknown to Penelope; the idea afflicts him; he in his trouble makes use of expressions which have for their object to get rid of the presence of his mother, who might throw obstacles in the way of his designs. His conduct is an exception, caused by an unusual conjuncture. The poet himself adds, that Penelope was astonished at the behaviour of Telemachus; and throughout the rest of the poem, the son of Ulysses shows the greatest deference to his mother. She is supreme in the palace; he is obliged to use precautions in order to quit Ithaca without her consent. She shows herself in the midst of the suitors, and appears amongst them as mistress of the palace which they are devastating. There are even two verses which prove that she exercised over her son a positive authority. She never permitted him, says Euryclea, to command the female slaves. Yet, if he had succeeded in his capacity of chief of the family to all the rights of his father, he would have had over the slaves of both sexes the same rights as Ulysses himself, who caused them to be chastised for their misconduct. These circumstances should have guided the readers of the Odyssey to the true sense of the four verses which seemed to throw Penelope into a situation of subordination in relation to her son; but the readers of the ancients have but too often found in those writings only what they were beforehand persuaded they should find.

The lot of the female slaves is, we acknowledge, the same in both poems. The laws of war, more severe than the usages of peace, were also more slow in receiving modification; even when the intercourse between fellow-citizens has become softened, it is natural enough that the ancient barbarity towards enemies should continue. Yet the destiny of the captive women is mentioned in the Odyssey in a language more compassionate than in the Iliad. Does not this slight difference prove an improvement in domestic manners, an improvement which had been attended by the painful consequence of rendering more terrible the lot of female prisoners ? The more happy the life they led in the bosom of their families the more odious must slavery have appeared to them. The more their husbands began to assign them honourable rank in society, the more repugnance they must have felt to lavish their charms on arrogant ravishers, who regarded them as a conquest. Briseis in the Iliad, the Briseis whose father had been killed by Achilles, attaches herself to the conqueror without scruple and without remorse; while the Odyssey presents us the picture of a woman, a prisoner, who is driven forward by force of blows; a rigorous treatment, which necessarily supposes in the unfortunate object of it a resistance, of which the Iliad offers us no example.

We will venture yet further. The Odyssey not only exhibits proof of a change in the condition of the women, but the effects of that change. It discloses the advantages which had been derived from it, and which consist in greater gentleness, a higher degree of charm, in more internal felicity; but it at the same time shows the evils which had ensued on these changes, and which are of a period still later than the benefits which had arisen. This perhaps requires some explanation.

The increased influence of women is attended with this natural consequence; the intercourse of men with these companions of their lives, who have acquired a more important station in society, becomes a more constant and habitual occupation. From this it results that love is regarded in a more detailed manner, in a greater variety of shades than before, and that the lights in which it is viewed are diversified. Of this variety of ways of regarding love, one is to look upon it as a matter of levity, as frivolous, as more or less immoral, and as a subject for pleasantry. But this view of the passion will not be taken of it until the serious ones have been exhausted. People whose manners are entirely rude treat love without delicacy, but do not make it the object of their jests. Whenever we find a writer who exercises his humour on this theme, we may be sure that he lived amongst men to a certain degree civilized. Now, we find indications of a disposition of this kind in the Odyssey, while in the Iliad no trace of it is to be found. The history of the amours of Mars and Venus-a tradition, by the way, of later date than the Iliad, for in that poem Vulcan has Charis, and not Venus, for his spouse-casts on the deceived husband a tincture of ridicule.

The infidelity of Helen is treated in a tone far more solemn. Menelaus is injured, but nobody regards the outrage as a theme for raillery. The Mercury of the Odyssey, jesting with Apollo on the fortune of Mars, which he envies, is the petit-maître of a society already in a state of corruption. Barbarous people consider pleasure in a graver light; it is with all imaginable seriousness that Agamemnon announces to the assembled Greeks, that he destines Chryseis for his bed, because in his eyes she surpasses Clytemnestra in beauty. It is without the least mixture of pleasantry that Thetis proposes to her son, in his despair for the death of Patroclus, to divert his grief by converse with a beautiful damsel.

The characters which are common to the Iliad and the Odyssey, strike an attentive eye by other differences; and these differences always betoken an advancement on the part of the Odyssey.

In both poems hospitality is a sacred duty; but the hospitality of the Odyssey has something milder and more feeling in it than that of the Iliad. In the hospitality of the Iliad there is nothing but good faith; there is delicacy in that of the Odyssey.

Nor is this all these two poems are not distinguished merely in

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points of morality, they vary in a literary point of view also; and these differences, as well as those above noticed, indicate two epochs of an improvement in civilization.

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The unity in the action of a poem, which renders that action more simple and clear; the concentration of interest by which the interest itself is rendered more lively and more intense, are improvements in the art. Such improvements are unknown to the Iliad. In that epic the action has no unity; from the earliest books the interest becomes divided. Every hero shines in his turn: Diomed, Ulysses, the two Ajaxes, the aged Nestor, and the youthful Patroclus, partake, with Achilles, our divided attention. We often forget, this very Achilles, the hero of the poem, leaving him idle in bis tent, while we follow to the combat the companions in arms whom he abandons. There are entire books in which his name is scarcely pronounced. Some might even be omitted altogether, and yet the loss of them remain unperceived by the reader.

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Lastly, the object which excites our most continued sympathy is Hector and if, on the one hand, we are drawn on by the spell of the poet to desire the fall of Troy; on the other, we constantly feel a painful sensation, from beholding, in the defender of this unfortu nate city, the only character to which all our delicate and generous sentiments can attach themselves without alloy. This fault, for this would certainly be a fault, if the object of the poet had been to to form a whole poem devoted to the celebration of the glory of Achilles; this fault, we say, has struck critics so forcibly, as to in-s duce them to attribute to Homer the intention of elevating the Trojans much above the Greeks; and the compassion which he attempts to excite for the misfortunes of the former, has appeared to corroborate this idea. This notion, however, is contradicted by the passages in which the poet speaks, we will not say in his own name, for that is never the case, but in a descriptive tone, which is more suited to disclose the secret inclination of the author, than the narrative or dramatic parts. Thus, for example, in the picture of the first battle in which the Greeks engage, their profound silence, the order of their march, the regularity of their movements, are placed in contrast with the tumult, the cries almost savage, the?? disorder and the want of discipline of the Trojan army.››

But although the Iliad be wanting in unity, it rises above all the works which the hand of man has yet produced, by its continuál progression in interest, in vivacity, in grandeur, and in force, with q the exception of one or two episodes, from the beginning to the end. As the poem proceeds, the action becomes more impetuous, the ột passions more violent, the figures more sublime, the exploits of the gods more marvellous, and more gigantic. This kind of merity as ↑ has been observed by a man of high talents, and deeply versed in researches of this nature, is far superior to that mechanical regula rity which subjects itself to the rule of making every thing subser-