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"soul-piercing strain" evidently rings in the ears of both. Dean Alford is here more poetical, Mr Worsley more literal, than his wont. The former gives us line for line, as usual; and the necessities of his stanza have only forced upon the latter the single interpolation of the few words in italics. We leave both versions to the kindly criticism of our readers: it is quite possible to prefer the one without being insensible to the merits of the other; but if Homer is ever to be read with pleasure in a translation by those who cannot understand the original, it must bear the mark, as Mr Worsley's does, of the poet's hand as well as the scholar's. No one can rise from a reperusal of the wondrous poems which bear the name of Homer, without feeling how much mystery hangs over them, which all the speculations of scholars have served rather to complicate than to clear away. To resolve the personality of the old blind bard into a motley band of rhapsodists, is so repugnant to all genuine poetic feeling, that we are thankful to find both our present translators assuming as a fact an identity of authorship for the Iliad and the Odyssey, of which Mr Newman has confessed that he feels "no conviction." It is much harder, and less delightful, to believe in twenty-four Homers than in one. But who the poet was, whence he drew his subjects, and where he sang, are questions which recur again and again, in spite of the hopelessness of an answer. Is this combination of the simplest patriarchal manners with traces of a high civilisation, a real picture of Greece before the Dorian migration, or is it an adaptation of Eastern legend? Is it, in some of its features, a picture painted from the life at all? The resemblance of the Homeric poems, in many remarkable features, to the tales of medieval chivalry, has been noticed by more than one writer.

The

peculiar caste of kings and chiefs kings and knights they are called in the Arthurian stories- before

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whom the "churls" tremble and fly like sheep, are common to both; their superhuman prowess in the battle, and their doughty performances at the banquet, are of precisely the same type; the special protection accorded to some favourite hero by a supernatural guardian; the entire freedom of the legends from any licentious sentiment; their purity of tone, in spite of a good deal of plain-speaking on subjects where the moderns are reticent ;all have a very remarkable resemblance. Helen is very like Guinevere, and even Arthur's death at the hands of Mordred-his illegitimate son-coincides curiously with the later legend of Ulysses slain by Telegonus, the fruit of his amour with Calypso. In both these cycles of fiction a state of things is represented - whether we call it the "heroic age," or the age of chivalry "-which surely never existed in actual life, as the writers present it to us; and in both, the phase of civilisation-the magnificence of the properties and the scenery—is far beyond what the narrators could have seen and known in their own days. It would not be fair to take from the Homeric poems such instances as the gardens of Alcinous, and his palace with its "doors of gold" and "posts of silver;" these descriptions may fairly be set down to the poet's imagination, since the whole episode is imaginative though we cannot subscribe to Mr Mure's theory of its being a burlesque; or, again, the Shield of Achilles, which is an exceptional production of divine workmanship; but let any reader compare the details of Menelaus's palace at Sparta, as visited by Telemachus (iv. 73, 121, &c.), "the gold, the electrum, the silver, and the ivory"

the high-roofed chambers, the golden distaff, the silver bathswith what Sparta or even Athens was in the historical days long after, and then explain to us, if this is only the natural licence of a poet's imagination, what had that imagination to draw from? Such ideas of

geography of what is, at the best, but a Greek romance. Whether Calypso's isle was Malta,-whether Alcinous's gardens were at Corfu,— whether Æolia might or might not have been "Stromboli misplaced,"

definite tangible splendour are not spontaneous to the poet of a rude and simple age, however much of the divine aflatus he may have within him. If Helen's use of the nepenthes, "that brings forgetfulness of all ills," be not in itself a remin--whether the gulf of the Læstryiscence of the Eastern haschish, there gonians has become famous again is something strongly Oriental in the for a scene almost as murderous as whole picture. If it be nothing Homer's, in the modern Balaclava, more than a poet's exaggerated and idealised view of an actual state of higher civilisation, which did really exist in the old Greek kingdoms, and disappeared under the Dorian Heraclids, it is a very singular record of a backward step in a nation's history, and the Homeric poems are especially valuable for having preserved to us the memorials of a state of society which would otherwise have passed altogether into oblivion. But it is singular that in the ancient Welsh poem Y Gododin, by Aneurin Owen, of which the date is said to be about A.D. 570, there are very similiar properties and scenery: "knights in armour of gold" and "purple plumes," riding on "thick-maned chargers," with "golden spurs," who must if ever they rode the Cambrian mountains-have been a very different race from the wild Welsh who held Edward Longshanks at bay. Is this merely the common language of all poets? If so, how comes it to be common to all? Were the Welsh who fought at the Cattraeth as superior in the scale of civilisation to their successors who fought at Conway, as the Spartans under Menelaus were to the Spartans under Leonidas? or was there some remote original, Oriental or other, whence this ornate military imagery passed into the poetry of so many different nations?

These seem questions of more interest than discussions as to the

these are speculations almost as fanciful as to seek to identify the localities in Sinbad's remarkable voyages. So it is with the allegory, or supposed allegory, contained in the wanderings of the Ithacan pilgrim. Critics, from Eustathius downwards, have busied themselves in discovering, or inventing, some hidden meaning in every scene and character. They have dealt with the Odyssey as a certain school of patristic theology dealt with the Old Testament; they so busied themselves with parabolical interpretations, that they lost their sense of the simple meaning of the text. Calypso, and Circe, and the Sirens, may typify Pleasure; Minerva may be "the reasoning faculty;" the fetters which bound Ulysses may be Duty and Self-control; the wondrous herb Moly may mean either "instruction," or "temperance," or anything else; or the Lotophagi may be the Lutherans, and Antinous Doctor Martin himself, in a prophetical sense, as the worthy Jacobus Hugo suggested; but in the one case as much as in the other, Bacon's brief criticism would truly apply-"I do rather think the fable was first, and the exposition devised after." These things are not Homer; they are but the mists which the Homerists have thrown round him. He moves among them all, a dark mysterious figure-vari sornús - but nothing less than divine.

CHARACTERISTICS OF LANGUAGE.

IN the month of September 1861 there was a great gathering of philologists, etymologists, grammarians, and antiquarians, collected by railroad from all the ends of Deutschland into the central and convenient city of Frankfort-on-the-Maine. This was the twentieth meeting of the kind. Such meetings are becoming popular now, for travelling is cheap and swift, and they are resorted to by workers and amateurs in different branches of knowledge, as a means of comparing notes, taking stock of progress, and communicating ideas; and they are combined with gastronomic and other facilities. Papers are read, speeches made, and dinners eaten, with occasional excursions into the country as an appetiser. Many pleasant remembrances will dwell in the mind of the writer of this article from the expedition to see the Pompeian villa of King Ludwig of Bavaria at Aschaffenburg-on-theMaine. It was a glorious autumn afternoon, preceded by a pleasant table-d'hôte at the Ostendhall, a practical joke having been played at the threshold of the garden by some waggish savant, who had chalked the image of a huge carnivorous dog, with "Cave canem," on the pavement, which set off every one in good-humour. There was none of the bustle of ticket-taking, for a special train had been secured. Arrived in the land of beer, a long jocose procession wound its way to the facsimile of the House of Pansa, standing on a rock at a bend of the Maine, commanding lovely views on each side, and landward the lower slopes of the Spessart-Gebirge. The house, inside and outside, was very perfect of its kind, and from the terrace was a fine look-out over the meadows opposite, with a squadron of sky-blue Bavarian soldiers exer

cising on the greensward, as if they had been placed there to compliment our visit. Unfortunately, the German climate is spoiling the delicate frescoes which imitate those with which the Roman house was embellished, illustrating in every room the domestic life, poetry, and mythology of classical times. However, there was enough left of the human forms portrayed to show us degenerate sedentary moderns how fallen we are from that type of human grace and beauty brought to perfection by the bath, the gymnasium, and the free-and-easy clothing in which the ancients rejoiced. They were not afraid of bright colours, for life was all brightness to them, and they did no more work than they could help. Godlike they certainly were, but like the gods of Epicurus. Our sober-hued philologists felt their spirits a little damped by the contrast, but this did not prevent them from thoroughly enjoying the festival with which the committee had provided them at "Die Harmonie," and harmoniously consuming a fabulous number of bottles of so-called champagne, which, as they were really a kind of Hochheimer, were appropriately drunk to the accompaniment of the German" Hoch!" which, being interpreted, is in English “Hip, hip, hurrah!”

Simultaneously with the meeting of the jolly philologists at Frankfort was also a monster-meeting of jolly naturalists at Speyer, on the Upper Rhine. It was observed by some one that the meetings ought to have been combined, for that philology is one kind of natural history, a higher branch of that ethnology which takes note of the physical qualities of the human race. Certainly a great revolution has lately come to pass in the science of language, if science it is still in strict

Zur Sprachwissenschaft. Von Professor H. WEDEWER. Freiburg, 1861.

ness to be called. Etymology has ceased to be guess-work, as it was in the time of Plato, and as it still remained in the time of Voltaire, who defined it as a science where the consonant was of little consequence, and the vowel of none at all. It now belongs to those branches of knowledge in which, as is the case with geology, the ascertained facts depend on Baconian induction, and are ascertained in proportion to the strength of the induction. The division of dead and living languages has ceased to be, for no language has ever died in the sense that an individual dies; though its elements die and are born again, every one is continuous and perpetual as the human race itself. The Anglo-Saxon may appear to us moderns as a dead language, but this is only because we do not see without much research the stream of changes by which it has passed into the modern English. Ör if it be necessary to modify this statement, we may say that a language is only liable to that sort of accidental and violent death to which a race of men is occasionally liable. The red men of the West India Islands have been exterminated, and if they spoke a different language from the North American Indians, which is probably not the fact, their language would have died with them, but still not completely so. Language possesses even more vitality than any given race of men, for as long as places and things in America are called by Indian names, such as Mississippi, Susquehanna, Toronto, it cannot be said the Indian language is dead. The Hebrew certainly is a case where the race may be said to possess more vitality than the language, for the Jews are all over the world, and retain everywhere their distinctive features, manners, customs, and religion, while their language in each case is that of the people amongst whom they live. But the Jews are a nation of mysterious and miraculous history, and the very way in which they speak other languages

may be cited in support of this indestructibility of speech; for on their words, as on their features, whatever be the tongue they speak, there is an undeniable Hebrew impress. The study of Sanscrit and other Oriental languages has not only set the science of language on its proper footing, by opening a wide field for induction, but enables us to get hold of some infallible facts with regard to the history of prehistoric times, and furnishes us with a most valuable text of the reliability of the actual records that have come down to us. The first of these great gains is an insight into the original unity of language. If it is pretty well established that all the European languages of our day, with the exception of one or two curious specimens spoken in odd corners, emanated from one original tongue, which philologists have agreed to call that of the Arians, or rather Aryans (to distinguish them from the followers of the great heresiarch), the same may be inferred with regard to the classes of languages which have not been as yet so thoroughly examined; nay more, it may be inferred that the Aryan language itself was but a branch of a common original world-wide mother-tongue. Not that this is a new fact, for we find it recorded in Genesis; but it is now placed on the footing of those scientific facts which have been put to the test of experience. The springs of the mystic river were declared to us before; and we were before able to watch the portion of the course of the stream by which we are standing, but the intermediate lands through which it flows were unexamined until now. As an example of the light which language throws on early history, we may cite the correction of the account of the first ages of Rome which is due to comparative grammar. The verification of Niebuhr's conjectures has been brought about by a science which was in its infancy in Niebuhr's time, and even

Niebuhr is likely himself to undergo a process of correction from the

same source.

Now, however prone we may be, on conservative grounds, to look askance at that German system of analysing and raising objections which tends to dislocate all primeval records, sacred and profane, we cannot stifle a secret rejoicing that the Roman historians who so sedulously cooked the bulletins of the early struggles of their nation should be taken down from the very high horse which they rode. The Romans, with all their grandeur, are by no means a lovable people. With regard to all the fine arts, they were Puritans minus religion. And one of the heaviest imputations under which they now lie, is that of having suppressed and ignored the Etruscans, a people of Greek-like character, to whom they owed all the early culture they possessed. The examination of newly-discovered Tuscan memorials, and the labours of comparative grammarians, have doubtless to a certain extent been successful in exposing the arrogant boastfulness of Roman annals in reference to the early times of their republic. Niebuhr established satisfactorily, on the whole, that the so-called magnanimity of Lars Porsena of Clusium, who withdrew his troops out of intense admiration of the people he was invading, resolved itself into mulcting them of a large portion of their territory, and introducing a strong Etruscan element into the senate. And now it turns out that the so-called Celeres, "fast men" or "knights," were an Etruscan body, the word being a Latin translation of Luceres or dugós (the Greek and Etruscan languages having a common Pelasgic origin); that Servius Tullius was an Etruscan prince, and not a slave, as his name seems to denote; that Lucumo was a title, and not a proper name (suv, Greek; Herzog,

German; Duke, English), and Lucius a Latin adaptation of the same; that Lars being the Etruscan for gws, Hero, the Dii Lares of the Romans were but the canonised souls of Etruscan ancestors; that Lartius the dictator was a temporary Etruscan king, his master of the horse being the commander of the Luceres, a Tuscan official; that Jupiter Optimus Maximus was himself an Etruscan god, being, in the Etrurian mythology, Tina or Tinia (Zv, Zavós, Greek); and thus that the Romans borrowed from the Etruscans the most imposing part their religion, the Latin tutelary deity being Mamers or Mars, whose symbol was the wolf, and that of the Sabines, Quirinus;-in fact, that the whole of the politer elements of Roman strength were of Etruscan origin, though the Romans had not the grace to acknowledge it.* It is impossible to overrate the value of the historical study of language as a method of detecting ancient impostors, who must have lain down to die with the secret satisfaction that all evidence of their falsehoods had perished with them.

It was an old notion that language was conventional, that people had put their heads together, and agreed to give things and their relations certain names by a vote of the majority, founded on the principle of universal suffrage. But it is more consistent with probability to suppose that language is a growth of the human race-that it sprang out of its organisation and brain, just as the hair of the European and the wool of the negro spring out of their respective scalps; and that not only the languages of men, but the imperfect dialects of the inferior animals, spring out of their organisation, perfect and imperfect in exact proportion to the physical organisation itself.

Consistently with this view, we

* See Revue des Deux Mondes, November 1861.

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