the very source of our own life; they appeal alike to rude sensibilities and to cultivated tastes; their splendour and pathos, their powerful vitality, the strength and swiftness of their numbers, require to be accentuated by no critical notes of admiration; they strike of themselves the least tutored native perception. These vigorous growths out of the deep soil of humanity have not yet been transported from the open air of indiscriminate enjoyment into the greenhouse of æstheticism; delight in them lays hold of any schoolboy capable of reading them fluently in the original as naturally as enthralment with Cinderella' or 'Jack the Giant-Killer' commands the unreflecting nursery. For they combine, as no other primitive poetry does, imaginative energy with sobriety of thought and diction. The ne quid nimis regulates all their scenes. They are simple without being archaic, fervid without extravagance, fanciful, yet never grotesque. The strict proprieties of classic form effectually restrain in them the exuberance of romantic invention. Not that any such distinctions in the mode of composition had then begun to be thought of. The poet was unconsciously a law unto himself.' Indeed the very potency of his creative faculty prescribed retrenchment and moderation; the images conjured up by it with much of the plastic reality of sculpture subjecting themselves spontaneously to the laws of sculpturesque fitness. Clearcut and firm of outline, they move in the transparent

ether of definite thought. Projected into the vaporous atmosphere of a riotous fancy, they might show vaster, but they could hardly be equally impressive.

But these matchless productions are not merely the 'wood-notes wild' of untrained inspiration. They imply a long course of free development under favourable conditions. The vehicle of expression used in them might alone well be the product of centuries of pre-literary culture. Greek hexameter verse was by no means an obvious contrivance. It is an exceedingly subtle structure, depending for its effect-nay, for its existence-upon unvarying obedience to a complex set of metrical rules. These could not have originated all at once, by the decree of some poetical law-giver. They must have been arrived at more or less tentatively by repeated experiments, the recog gised success of which led, in the slow course of time, to their general adoption.

Moreover, the legendary materials of the Epics were not dug straight out of the mine of popular fancy and tradition. They had doubtless been claborated and manipulated, before Homer took them in hand, by generations of singers and reciters. The 'tale of Troy divine' was already a full-leaved tree when he plucked from it and planted the branches destined to flourish through the ages. His verses display or betray acquaintance with many other stories' of public notoriety besides those completely unfolded in them. The fate of Agamemnon, the

death of Achilles, the madness of Ajax, the advent of Neoptolemus, the slaying of Memnon, son of the Morning, the ambush in the Wooden Horse, the mysterious wanderings of Helen, the last journey of Odysseus, furnished themes of surpassing interest, all or most of which had been made into songs for the pastime of lordly feasters and the solace of noble dames, before the wrath of Achilles suggested a more adventurous flight. Inexhaustible, indeed, was the store of romantic adventure furnished by the famous ten years' siege.

A castle built in cloudland, or at most

A crumbling clay-fort on a windy hill,
Where needy men might flee a robber-host,

This, this was Troy! and yet she holds us still.'

But the saga-literature of the Greeks did not begin with the mustering of the fleet at Aulis. The anteTroica' were not neglected. Many a ballad was chanted about the doings of those 'strong men' who lived before Agamemnon,' although it was not their fortune to be commemorated by a supreme singer. That supreme singer, however, knew much concerning the Argonauts, the War of Thebes, the Calydonian Boar-hunt, the sorrows of Niobe, and the betrayal of Bellerophon; ante-Trojan lays served as parables for the instruction of Clytemnestra, and the recreation of Achilles in that disastrous interval when he doffed

'Lang's Helen of Troy, vi. 21.

his armour and strung his lyre. And a small but privileged class of the community was devoted, under the presumed tuition of the Muses, to the perfecting and perpetuation of these treasures of poetic lore.

Homer was accordingly no unprepared phenomenon. He rose in a sky already luminous. The flowering of his genius, indeed, marked the close of an epoch. His achievements were of the definitive and synthetic kind; they summed up and surpassed what had previously been accomplished; they were the outcome-although not the necessary outcomeof a multitude of minor performances.

Now it is impossible to admit the prevalence of such sustained poetical activity as the Homeric Epics by their very nature postulate, apart from the existence of a tolerably wide-spread and well-regulated social organisation. They besides describe a polity which was certainly not imaginary, and thus lead us back to a pre-Hellenic world, different in many ways from historical Greece, and separated from it by several blank and silent centuries. The people who moved and suffered, and nurtured their loves and grudges in it, were called 'Achæans'-the ethnical title given by Homer to his countrymen from all parts of the Greek peninsula and its adjacent islands. Homer himself was evidently an Achæan; Achilles, Agamemnon, and Odysseus, Helen and Penelope, sprang from the same race, which was an offshoot from the general Hellenic stock. They were a sea

faring people, but not much given to commerce; active, energetic, sensitive, highly imaginative, they showed, nevertheless, receptivity rather than inventiveness as regards the practical arts of life. Their great national exploit was probably that bellicose cxpedition to the Troad upon which the Ilian legend, with all its mythical accretions, was founded; and some records of attacks by them on Egypt have been deciphered on hieroglyphically-inscribed monuments; but they can claim no assured place in history. As a nation, they ceased indeed to exist before the dim epoch of fables came to an end; the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus brought about their political annihilation and social disintegration, impelling them, nevertheless, to establish new settle. ments in Asia Minor, and thus setting on foot the long process by which Greek culture became cosmopolitan.

Homeric conditions do not then represent simply an initial stage in classic Greek civilisation. There was no continuous progress from the one state of things to the other. Development was interrupted by revolution. Hence, much irretrievable loss and prolonged seething confusion; until, out of the chaos, a renovated order emerged, and the Greece of the Olympiads comes to view in the year 776 B.c.

For this reason Homeric Greece is strange to history; the relative importance of the states included in it, the centre of gravity of its political power, the