have been, then where it must have been.

But, by whomsoever written, here they are! The Iliad and the Odyssey exist for us; they have descended from a remote antiquity, and give us most valuable intimations of the manners and modes of thought and feeling of ancient times. The precise date when these poems were written may still be doubtful; but this is of little consequence so long as we confine our deductions to a certain period that we are contented to call the heroic period of Greece. When, however, we proceed, as Mr Gladstone does, to draw inference from them of the political and religious state and condition of Troy, and of the Greeks as they lived and acted at the siege of Troy, it becomes then necessary to fix the date of their composition with some precision.

Homer-for we shall speak of a one Homer, the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, leaving the doubts which hang over this subject still unresolved,-Homer would necessarily describe the state of manners with which he was familiar. Though his poems are two great romances, and though he deals with gods and demigods, and tells and invents the most marvellous things, he would not invent a whole system of manners, customs, institutions. One may find materials for history, and many true details of life, of customs and opinions, in the Arabian Nights, because the authors of these fictions might invent genii and giants, but they would not, and could not, invent an entirely new state of society, and forms of government and religion that did not exist. We are sure, therefore, that we have in the Iliad and the Odyssey a valuable record of the age in which they were written.

As a picture of ancient manners, these poems have been well studied. There is very little left here for the discoverer. Mr Gladstone adds nothing to the terse and compendious descriptions which Mr Grote has given in the second volume of his History. The Greeks of Homer's time were a semi-barbarous race, cruel, revengeful, often brutal, reckless of human life, bound by few ties

of duty; and on the other hand, brave, hospitable, at times generous, and (which is their best trait), sufficiently humanised to treat their wives and their daughters with honour and respect. Their manners are of the most primitive character. Achilles cooks the dinner; Ulysses builds the house. Their political institutions are very unsettled. Their kings or chiefs owe their authority to personal prowess, to a reputation for bravery or sagacity. The prince has as much power as he can keep. There is very little of the government of law. If one man kills another, the relations of the murdered man pursue their own revenge. In lieu of revenge they may accept a fine, but there appears to be no power to compel them to receive this compensation. What we call our obligations to society, are very dimly recognised. Hospitality is practised, as we find amongst other semi-barbarous people, but the stranger was not safe till he had put himself under the protection of the gods: he came as a suppliant, and the host, binding. himself by an oath, took the character of protector. Wherever there is much dependence placed upon the oath, we may be sure there is very little general and habitual morality. This picture of Homeric manners is seen reflected amongst the gods: they too have very little care for the general good-are capricious, revengeful

moved by personal feelings of hostility or of kindness. The government of Jupiter is as lax and unsettled as the rule of Agamemnon. His deities are self-willed, and Jove himself has to make concessions, and it is as much by skilful management of his refractory council, as by inherent power and authority, that he contrives to get the decrees of Fate executed..

All historians and critics agree in portraying this period in much the same colours. Some are more impressed with the lights, some with the shadows, but the picture cannot be very different to any two candid observers. Mr Gladstone dwells more frequently on the virtues than the vices of this heroic period, but he does not omit the latter. Perhaps the chief source of the difference

scended from patriarchal times, of which those who desire to know more than they will learn from the book of Genesis, may consult the Talmud with advantage. We must endeavour to state Mr Gladstone's views in his own words, though it will take some trouble to select from his ample and redundant pages any statement that will at once be brief, full, and explicit. But before we proceed to the further exposition of Mr Gladstone's theory, or the theory to which he has devoted this exercise of his argumentative ingenuity, let us recall what we had previously learned, from other authorities, to consider as settled conclusions on this subject of Greek mythology. It is always well, before opening a new book, to call to mind what we have obtained by our previous reading and reflection. Nothing can be more plain than that the poems of Homer do not represent to us the earliest form of religious faith; they refer us distinctly to earlier gods, and to gods conceived of in an earlier manner. The fables related of the Olympian deities, their very names and their attributes, carry us back to some period when the gods were more nearly identified with the elements over which they rule than they were in the times of Homer. Many of these fables wear the unmistakable appearance of having been suggested, in the first place, by allegories and personifications which originally were merely methods of describing physical facts. The alternation of day and night, of spring and winter-the power of the sun over all vegetable and animal life-the dawn, the dew, the fertilising shower, the unceasing activity and mutability of nature, life and death, generation and decay incessantly giving place to each other-these were the great patent truths which reflective men, of ardent and imaginative temper, had first to express, and which they perhaps inevitably expressed in the language of metaphor and personification. A statement of natural phenomena expressed in a series of personifications becomes itself a history, or sooner or later tempts to the moulding of it into some narrative. If the imaginative thinker of one age, looking admiringly on the sudden bursting forth

of all the glories and the growths of spring-noting how the earth produces all this marvellous birth of tree, and flower, and fruit, under the influence of bright skies and moist showersshould proclaim this to be the blessed marriage of the heaven and the earth, we may be sure that some subsequent thinker, dwelling on the image here presented to him, would be tempted to describe this marriage -to describe the bridegroom and the bride. These would certainly be king and queen, if such dignities were known to him; and these royal titles would alone suggest a government, as well as a matrimonial union, and subjects to govern both in heaven and in earth. We are launched at once into an anthropomorphic mythology. A Zeus, the god of day, and light, and of the upper air, marries Here, goddess of the earth; and by-and-by we have a King and Queen of Olympus, ruling over men and gods, and a Jupiter and Juno, who are no longer bound to any one element, but to whom all the elements of the world are equally free. The stars of heaven, and the passage of the sun through constellations, named from fancied resemblances to terrestrial objects-our first astronomy, in short-was sufficient of itself to give origin to a multitude of fables. The imaginative poet only needed that two or three positive facts should be given him-the wilder and the more unconnected the better-and he would piece them together into some narrative. The more abrupt and extravagant the fragments given to him, the more likely would they be to stimulate his invention to supply the missing links. The zodiac alone, and the sun, now brighter, and now dimmer, tracing his way through it, was enough to people the world with legends-the labours of Hercules, and the like-which very soon lost all recognisable connection with the sun, and the stars, and the seasons. What is more, when the poets have framed these wild legends out of materials thus accidentally given to them, other men, because they are so wild and absurd as narratives, begin to supply profound moral meanings for them.

When we say that the perusal of the Homeric poems alone, without further or collateral evidence, is sufficient to prove an antecedent period of nature-worship, we beg leave to add that we by no means understand by that term a worship in which nothing was present to the mind but the literal facts or forces of nature, nothing but physical phenomena. The physical phenomena-if imagination stirs at all within us, if there is any worship at all-have been animated, we may be sure, by a power analogous to human will or human thought. But the term nature-worship is serviceable to point out that epoch when the gods were conceived of as in close combination with the elements, or when some great Pantheistic idea was expressed by a deification of separate elements.

No religion of any service to man or to society can arise till the god has been so far humanised as to be invested with a moral character. Now the separation of the god from the elemental forces of nature, and converting it into a mere "immortal man," seems, in an intellectual point of view, to be a retrograde step; but it is in reality a necessary and progressive step, in order to the subsequent conception of the god as invested with perfect reason and perfect justice. If the anthropomorphic god of Homer seems, because of its very distinctness, a less rational conception than the nature god of the Pantheist, it at all events gives us that representation of the god on which a far higher and more effective conception than the Pantheist possessed could alone be raised. The mythology of Homer represents the deities of Olympus walking in perfect freedom amongst the elements, completely humanised, but humanised, as yet, after a very imperfect standard of intelligence and morality.

It may be well to note in passing, that personifications are not only made of nature, of the celestial bodies and the elements, but also of the attributes of man-his virtues, or his vices, or his passions. Thus we have Themis, a god of justice. And in systems of a more refined and subtle character than the theology of Homer, this kind of personi

fication had been carried a stage farther, for we have the attributes of the god personified. That Wisdom, by which God made the world, becomes a distinct being, an intermediate agent, and the actual commissioned creator of the world, the Supreme Being falling back into what seemed to such thinkers a more honourable obscurity, and a remoteness from any contact with a degrading matter.

Though it seems clear that the imagination which produced the Olympic deities, and the legends related of them, was, in the first instance, prompted, guided or misguided, by allegories or personifications originally expressing physical facts, it is not pretended by any one that these allegories are always to be traced in the full-grown fable. Once launched upon his story, what was to arrest the poet, until the story itself had assumed a fixed form in the popular belief, and was no longer to be tampered with? Nor can any one trace the subtle progress from what we have described as a natureworship. When it was that Phoebus Apollo first left the sun fairly behind him, moved freely from it, and entered, without a care about this luminary, into the court of Olympus, or the shady recesses of groves haunted by the nymphs, it is impossible to say; but it is equally impossible to deny that this Phoebus Apollo was born of the light of the sun. This is clear, although there may be another sun-god, earlier or later, a Helios also in Olympus, not so far advanced in his humanity, and retaining more of the elemental god. Homer did not want this Helios. If he had once brought him on the plains of Troy-once mixed him up in the strife of gods and men-his godship would have assumed a new or more decided character.

But, we repeat, the humanising or anthropomorphic proceeding was not a degradation of a higher conception, unless it interfered with a certain vague Pantheism; and, at all events, if not itself an advancement, was a necessary step towards the representation of the god in that grand personality of perfect will and perfect reason which is our final conception.