much firmer hold of popular sympathy by the fangs of this actuality, than he now has with all the elaborate art, all the curious felicity, and all the graceful simplicity of his diction? The short, simple story of Enoch Arden,' woven as it is out of the common yarn of a manly English seaman's life, and breathing in every line the living atmosphere of English strength, English endurance, and Christian gentleness, will find an echo in hundreds of hearts, for whom King Arthur and his heroes of the Round Table can never possess any interest beyond that of a tasteful phantasmagoria. A strong foundation of popular faith, and a breezy freshness of popular interest, are absolutely necessary for the complete success of a great picture or a great poem. The ethereal subtlety and the transcendental power of Percy Bysshe Shelley, are lost to the great mass of English readers by a deficiency in these two important respects. He is very grand; but he is neither English, nor earthly, nor even human. Who cares to unbind Prometheus from his Caucasian crucifixion at this time of day? Lord Byron startled for a season, but failed permanently to interest his readers, by his exotic tales of Turkish tyrants, Greek corsairs, and Albanian brigands; but when, in an age of travelling, he appealed to the permanent interest of travel in the human heart, he executed a work that will last. His 'Childe Harold' is a sort of sentimental Odyssey, and though its sentiment is often false, and its hero a mere shadow, this work will certainly survive, by its powerful descriptions of some of the most interesting scenes on which the great drama of human civilisation has been acted. Juan,' again, is a versified novel, and has all the real interest which belongs to the vivid and expert exhibition of any side of human life. There is something solid here to feed on, though certainly neither is the meat of the most nourishing. Don But the quality, nor the seasoning particularly salubrious. poet moves everywhere in this work with the most easy naturalness, and is marvellously honest. There is that dash of reality about his pictures, which in the hand of genius never fails to charm, and which even dulness finds it difficult altogether to make void of significance. Reality, therefore, is what we are to seek for in Homer, if the Iliad be really the great work of epic art for which thirty centuries of consenting men have taken it; and this reality, so far as the materials of the Homeric poetry are concerned, that is, everything in it not derived from the specific genius of the author, is expressed by the single word TRADITION. By tradition (Tapúdoots), in the original sense of the word, we mean the delivery of anything or of any word from hand to hand, or from mouth to mouth; but more popularly, in our language, we understand by this term the handing down of any sort of knowledge or opinion from generation to generation, without that fixation of testimony which the use of inscriptions and written documents insures. Now, tradition is of two kinds-religious and secular;1 and under these two categories, of course, must be comprehended all the poetic material which we find elaborated into classical shape in the great popular epics of early Greece. We shall first speak of the religious tradition. The Iliad is not a religious poem in any sense; the Epic of the Greek generally indeed, as contrasted with that of the Hindoo, is essentially a secular Epic; but like every great poem, and every high 1 Or, as the Germans call it, Götter and Heldensage. Of these two, W. Grimm is of opinion that, when a peo- | ple is independent and undisturbed by foreign aggression in the earliest stages of society, the former comes first to maturity (Deutsche Heldensage. philosophy, it acknowledges the gods, and feels the gods, and works out its catastrophe under the constant providence and presidency of the gods. The religious element of the Iliad is patent to every eye, from the first great announce ment Διὸς τ ̓ ἐτελείετο βουλή, to the hanging out of the two fateful scales in Olympus (lib. xxii. 209), by which the issue of the long-suspended struggle between the two adverse heroes is intimated. This element consists of two parts: the devout feeling or piety of the persons who express the sentiment of the Epic, and the celestial company of the gods who are the object of that feeling. The existence of the former part in Homer has been denied by none; but the reality of the other, or of the gods as true gods and not mere men under an exalted and transfigured aspect, was denied in ancient times by a notorious Messenian called Euhemerus, whose opinions, though offensive alike to the mass and to men of real philosophical insight, found considerable currency among a certain class of thinkers, and have not been without their advocates in modern times, especially in France and England.' To Homer, per says that the Oriental Epic is " ampiezza e maestà di gran largo su But the amplitude is rather a fault, and the majesty is so ill managed that it constantly passes into the absurd. Rámáyana or Mahá-bhárata without feeling that they rise above the Homeric poems in this-that a deep reli-periore alla Greca" (Del Bello, ch. 9). gious meaning appears to underlie all the narrative, and that the wildest allegory may be intended to conceal a sublime moral, symbolizing the conflict between good and evil, and teaching the hopelessness of victory in so terrible a contest without purity of soul, self-abnegation, and the subjugation of the passions."-Williams on Indian Epic Poetry, 1863, p. 47. This religious element is no doubt what GIOBERTI alludes to when he 1 Euhemerus flourished in the times of the early Macedonian kings, the immediate successors of Alexander the Great (Euseb. Præpar. Evang. 11. 2, 29). The startling paradox of his work caused it to be extensively read, even by those who were far from being ready to assent to its doctrines; and the partial truth which belonged to it in its however, and to the Greeks, as to the great mass of modern readers, who have no mythological theory to support, the Olympian personages in the Iliad are as distinctly marked off from the terrestrial, as the celestial figures in the upper region of a picture of the old Italian school are separated from the mortals in the lower. We shall not therefore trouble ourselves with a formal refutation of the sceptical paradox of the Messenian in this place, who indeed received the just reward of his shallow irreverence by the surname of "Atheist," which he received from the ancient world, and is sufficiently refuted by the question which a profound ancient thinker puts: "If the gods of Homer are only men elevated into godship, whence did the persons who performed this act of deification derive the idea of the gods, into whose fellowship, with such transcendental demonstration of gratitude, they transferred their fellow-mortals?" 3 Let us therefore say plainly, that in Homer there is everywhere present à real worship of real gods, that is, of superhuman personages who a god and a god from a man. In this sense I allow the dictum, but exactly in the same way that I admit a certain range of low organic life, in which it is impossible to distinguish a plant from an animal. Nevertheless, in the gross, a plant is a plant and an animal is an animal, with a distinctiveness which no sophistry can confound. application to the heroes and demigods | it is difficult to distinguish a man from by the fatal facility of human logic, often sufficed to give it a show of universal validity. It was honoured by a translation into Latin from the pen of the poet Ennius (Cic. Nat. Deor. 1. 42). The influence of the opinions of Euhemerus is easily traced in many chapters of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Diodorus Siculus. The principal advocates of Euhemerus in modern times were Banier and Faber. 1 When Mr. Grote says (Part 1. chap. 16,) that "gods and men are undistinguishable in Grecian antiquity," he must either be a Euhemerist, which he certainly is not, or he must mean that there is a certain dim borderland of Hellenic myth in which 2 Even from some of the Fathers (Εὐημέρου τοῦ ἀθεωτάτου.—Theoph. ad Autol 11. 7.), though these writers generally looked with favour on atheists of this class as among their most efficient allies in attacking idolatry. 3 Sextus Empiricus adv. Math. lib. viii. Genev. 1621, p. 314. really represent divine power in some shape; and we may assert further, with the most perfect truth, and as one leading characteristic of the Homeric poetry, that the attitude of the poet in reference to the national theology, which his works exhibit, was purely receptive, and his function merely representative. No doubt, there have been poets in all ages who have written under an inspiration of polemical hostility to the faith of the people whose language their works have adorned. Lucretius, already mentioned, Byron, Shelley, and Euripides, are familiar examples of this type. But this is neither the natural position of poetry, nor is it a position possible to be held by a truly national and a widely popular poet, such as Homer is on all hands admitted to have been. Poetry, as the general term for purified and culminating emotion, of course comprehends piety, or devout feeling, as the most vital part of itself; and this devout feeling, in a normal state of society, will always attach itself with a kindly and uncritical sympathy to the forms of religious worship and the objects of religious faith acknowledged in the atmosphere to which it belongs. No true poet is naturally a sceptic. Under exceptional circumstances only he may be forced into a sceptical position, but he will never be either comfortable or complete till he has found a faith of some kind or other as the natural keystone of sustainment to the ideal structure of his thoughts. But Homer was not merely a poet composing a poem for himself, as poets now do, and flinging it abroad on the chance of catching a certain set of sympathizing readers; he was a popular minstrel, in an age when books and readers were unknown, wandering from town to town, and singing or reciting his works mostly by independent parts, for popular entertainment. That a poet so circumstanced should do otherwise than simply accept |