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particular liabilities and imperfections are never imputed to either of them individually. What is said of them inclusively with others, is in reality not said of them

at all, but only of the prevailing disposi tion of the body to which they belong; just as we are told in the Iliad that all the gods were incensed with Jupiter because of his bias towards the Trojans, when we know that it was in reality only some amongst them of the greatest weight and power. Neither Apollo nor Minerva eats, or drinks, or sleeps, or is wearied, or is wounded, or suffers pain, or is swayed with passion. Neither of them is ever outwitted or deluded by any deity of invention, as Venus is, or even Jupiter is, by Juno, in the Fourteenth Iliad."

But Minerva and Apollo sit at the feasts of the gods. To omit them would have been thought a great indignity; for Homer's gods have little else to do than to feast, except when they are intermeddling with Greeks and Trojans; and all the deities, with Jupiter at their head, set forth to enjoy the sacrifices of the Ethiopians. But "what is said of them inclusively is really not said of them at all." It is nowhere hinted-except in Mr Gladstone's bookthat Minerva and Apollo enjoyed the sacrifices made to them in any more refined manner than Jupiter and Juno. Not swayed by passion!" One sees very little else than passion and favouritism in any of the gods; and Minerva is often in a towering passion, and sometimes terribly sulky, as when she and Juno, after having mounted the car, and galloped half-way to the plains of Troy to take part in the combat, are compelled by Jupiter to return, and unharness the steeds, and sit down quietly on their chairs in Olympus.

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is, that all the poets find it convenient to treat this attribute of gigantic stature in a very capricious manner. It is a grand image to be occasionally introduced, but it would be extremely embarrassing to have to deal constantly with beings of enormous bulk. Mars covers seven acres when he falls: the image pleased the poet, and when the god was down upon the earth, it was no matter how huge he was; seven acres would lie as quietly as one; he was manageable there. But Homer did not make with Diomed. Our own Milton deals him seven acres high when fighting in the same manner with great height. His archangel stalks before us for a moment in gigantic proportions, but the imagination is not tasked to keep such a conception constantly before it.

Homer, the poet of war, could hardly have done honour to Minerva, his favourite goddess, unless he had invested her with martial attributes. These martial attributes are thus accounted for by Mr Gladstone :—

"Partly in relation of Minerva to Mars, whom she punishes or controls, but more particularly in the use of the magnificent symbol of the Egis by Minerva and Apollo, we appear to find that development of the martial character which has been mentioned above as included among the Jewish ascriptions to the Messiah.”

P. 95.

Yet

The case is past comment. the manner in which Apollo, and Diana, and Latona are treated, is perhaps even still more extraordinary. Apollo, Mr Gladstone observes, kills with his unerring arrows; Diana also has the same direct power of inflicting death on women. "There is no instance, if I remember rightly," he adds, "in which any other of the gods brings about the death of a mortal otherwise than by means of second causes." Neptune could drown a man in his waves, but does not strike him dead with his trident. Homer perhaps would not have thought any mortal very safe who should get within the reach of that trident when the god was in anger. But mythologists generally admit that Apollo had some peculiar relation to death. Mr Gladstone has the peculiar merit of tracing this relation

to certain Messianic traditions. We are afraid to state precisely what tradition; for sometimes Apollo represents part of the character of the Evil One, and sometimes, and more generally, part of the character of Him who was to destroy death itself! We confess ourselves to be utterly bewildered.

"In considering what may have been the early traditional source of these remarkable attributes of the children of Latona, we should tread softly and carefully, for we are on very sacred ground. But we seem to see in them the traces of the form of One who, as an all-conquering King, was to be terrible and destructive to his enemies, but who was also, on behalf of mankind, to take away the sting from death, and to change its iron hand for a thread of silken slumber."-P. 104. Will a solemnity of manner help us at all through the obscurity in which our author envelopes us? In a subsequent page he asks many questions such as these: Why was Apollo, thus associated with death, likewise the god of foreknowledge? Why did he, and he only, partake of this privilege with Jupiter? Why, again, should the god of foreknowledge be the god of medicine? And why should the god of medicine also absorb into himself the divinity of the sun? And after asking these and other questions, he answers them by saying that Apollo "represented the legendary anticipations of a person to come, in whom should be combined all the great offices in which God the Son is now made known to man as the Light of our paths, the Physician of our diseases, the Judge of our misdeeds, and the Conqueror and disarmer, but not yet abolisher, of death." Some of these questions which Mr Gladstone asks have received all the answer that mythological questions admit of; but now we also would ask this question, Why is it that Apollo, who represents the legendary anticipation of a Messiah that is to bring happiness and virtue

and a golden age upon the earth, is just as indifferent as the rest of the Olympian deities to the future destinies of man? He who represents the Messianic tradition should surely be a beneficent deity, solicitous to restore or to produce a happy order of things for man. He should have some mission, some office, or at least some desire for the good of all mankind. Not a trace of anything of the kind do we find in the Apollo of Homer. Neither in him, in Minerva, nor in any of the gods, is there the least solicitude for the happiness of the human race.*

If there is any part of Homer's religious system which, more than another, seems the child-like utterance of the human imagination, it is his description of the state and nature of the dead. The dead are mere shadows of the living; they are mere memories that go fleeting through Hades for no intelligible purpose. His dead have nothing to do but to recall the griefs and pleasures of life, and even the recollection of pleasure is a regret. Elysium and Olympus itself are open to favoured heroes akin to the gods, but as yet there is no Heaven open to moral excellence, and where this human nature itself will attain a higher development of goodness and intelligence. Yet even here Mr Gladstone must help the imagination of Homer by some tradition gathered from the sacred Scriptures. After mentioning that we have in Homer's after-world the leading ideas of a place of bliss, and a place of torment-though the Tartarus was not so much for the wicked as for those who had especially offended the gods he says:

"A further element of indistinctness attaches to the invisible world of Homer,

if we take into view the admission of favoured mortals to Olympus; a process of which he gives us instances, as in Ganymede and Hercules. In a work of pure invention it is unlikely that Heaven, Elysium, and the under-world would all

When Neptune challenges Apollo to fight for his cause, "O Neptune," he replies, "thou wouldst not say that I am prudent if I should now contend with thee for the sake of miserable mortals, who, like the leaves, are at one time very blooming, feeding on the fruit of the soil, and at another again perish without life. Rather let us cease from combat as soon as possible, and let them decide the matter themselves." This is the excuse which Apollo puts forward; "for," it is added, "he was afraid to come to strife of hands with his uncle."

have been represented as receptacles of souls in favour with the Deity. But some primitive tradition of the transla tion of Enoch may account for what would otherwise stand as an additional anomaly."-P. 171.

If there is any meaning in this passage, there is a connection traced between Ganymede and Enoch! Indeed, the analogies which Mr Gladstone finds, and the applications of Scripture which he permits himself to make, surpass anything, for their perverted ingenuity, we have encountered in modern literature. We must go back a century or two to find a parallel case. We are apt to smile at the applications of Scripture texts which pious and simple-minded people, by their very simplicity, are led to make. They are not more strange than some of the applications which our learned author, the very reverse of simple-minded, is led into by his perverse ingenuity. There was amongst the Olympian deities, besides Apollo, a sun-god Helios, and this sun-god Mr Gladstone describes-whether with perfect accuracy or not we will not stay to discuss-as being afterwards absorbed in Apollo. Thereupon he adds:

"In this view the mythological absorption of the Sun in Apollo is a most striking trait of the ancient mythology: and it even recalls to mind that sublime representation of the prophet, 'The sun shall be no more thy light by day, neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee; but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.""-P. 265.

The mythological process of the absorption of a nature-god into a heroic god-both having peculiar relations to the sun-is illustrated by the grand metaphor of the Hebrew Prophet that God himself shall be our light! The mind can just catch at a point of resemblance, but only to throw it away again with displea

sure.

Homer's deities are not eternal, they are not creative; they have superhuman powers, and they are immortal. But it is a poor life, when compared to that of human beings, that the poet has been able to imagine for them. The banquet, nectar or ambrosia, is all that the heavens supply.

VOL. LXXXIV.—NO. DXIV.

They have no other resource to vary the monotony of Olympus than to engage in the strife and the passions of men. Even for their loves they come down to earth. They are wearied of each other. And what a subordinate, childish, and irrational part it is they play in the affairs of men! Achilles fights, and Minerva picks up the thrown spear and gives it back again into the hands of the hero. It is a type of all they do. The passions of the maddest of men are reason itself compared to the anger of these gods: they have nothing to fight for, nothing to gain or to lose, and they have as little concern for the just government of the world as the storms that are sweeping over the face of the earth. Some Higher Destiny, apparently, has appointed both these storms and these gods. Mr Gladstone says truly: "What a wretched spectacle would Hector, Achilles, Diomed, Nestor, Ulysses, and the rest, present to us, were their existence devoted simply to quaffing goblets and scenting or devouring the flesh of slain animals, even though with this there were present the mitigating refinement of perpetual harp and song, And yet such is the picture offered by the Homeric mythology."

Nevertheless, of this mythology our author writes :—

"Thus it was that the sublime idea of one Governor of the universe, omnipotent over all its parts, was shivered into many fragments, and these high prerogatives, distributed and held in severalty, are the fragments of a conception too weighty and too comprehensive for the unassisted human mind to carry in its entireness."

-P. 209.

Burdened with his too vast idea, the poet breaks it in pieces, and coins these heroic gods out of its fragments. Is this a probable genesis of the Homeric mythology? Do we see even the fragments of the greater conception? And when such men as Aristotle rose to as high conception of deity as any we are able to form, how was it that then "the unassisted human mind could carry it in its entireness?"

The gods of Homer are not eternal, neither do they create; but they are immortal. Hardly could the poet do less for them than release them from

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death. But the imagination of the Greek must always, according to Mr Gladstone, be indebted more or less to the traditions of some Hebrew or Semitic patriarch. Accordingly, upon this immortality of the Homeric gods he makes the following observations :

"There is something curious in the question why it is that they are endowed uniformly and absolutely with this gift, but not with others; why the limitation of Death is removed from them, and yet other limitations are allowed in so many respects to remain.

"It seems as if we had here an independent and impartial testimony to the truth of the representation conveyed in Holy Writ, that death has been the specific punishment ordained for sin ; and that therefore, in passing beyond the human order, we, as a matter of course, pass beyond its range."

Men never think or imagine on the principle of contrast. They gave immortality to their gods because they were familiar with this property, as having been once their own! If our readers feel fatigued at this wire-drawing, it is really not our fault it was necessary to give some specimens, and we might easily have multiplied them.

As might be expected, Mr Gladstone regards the rite of sacrifice, so extensively prevalent over all the heathen world, as another portion of the primeval inheritance." It had been instituted before the Homeric age-there can be no doubt of that; but it is one of those institutions which it is needless and idle to trace to any one special origin. Sacrifice, like prayer, has arisen wherever the idea existed of a god who might be induced to favour man. In the Book of Genesis no other account is given of its origin. Cain and Abel are represented as prompted by their spontaneous feelings to testify their gratitude by an offering to God. To bring an offering is, in one period of our mental culture, as natural an act as to utter a prayer:* now Mr Gladstone does not tell us that prayer,

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which is the nobler ritual of the two, descended to mankind from the Hebrew patriarchs. In Homer's time we still see the sacrifice regarded as a present to the god, from which the god himself receives some benefit. The savour of it is agreeable to him: in some manner or other, he derives a personal gratification from the "burnt thighs of fat oxen. As intelligence is developed, we find the Greek, at least the educated Greek, interpreting the sacrifice in quite a different sense. He no longer regards it as something necessary or useful to the god; he ponders only on the benefit to be derived to the worshipper. God accepts it as a sign of gratitude, or a sign of repentance for sin. Or it becomes a mode of communication between the god and the worshipper, the god having in some way entered into the sacrifice offered to him: after this it may be redolent of prophetic knowledge; or the worshipper, by partaking of it, may be a partaker of the divine spirit. Many subtle interpretations follow. These interpretations form the higher part of the religious faith, not the rite itself, to which the very rudest or most child-like conceptions may have given origin.

But although the reader of Mr Gladstone's book will feel, we suspect, a mere perplexity, a mere distress and vexation, as of labour thrown away in vain, as he follows him through those trains of reasoning by which he supports his mythological theory, he will yet be occasionally rewarded by remarks both of an interesting and an instructive description. When our author liberates himself from the prepossessions which this theory throws around him, he can show himself an intelligent and tasteful critic of Homer. Many observations which he makes, both on his heroes, his gods, and such imaginary beings as his Cyclops, who are neither heroes nor gods, are well deserving of study and remembrance. How well are the Cyclops here delineated :

* If an animal is to be offered, there are but two ways of doing it, either by preserving it separate and intact, or by killing it. In aid of the last mode came the idea of offering life itself—of pouring out the blood, which contained the life.

"Among them all, the Cyclops, children of Neptune, offer as a work of art by far the most successful and satisfactory result. In every point they are placed at the greatest possible distance from human society and its conventions. Man is small, the Cyclops huge. Man is weak, the Cyclops powerful. Man is gregarious, the Cyclops is isolated. Man, for Homer, is refined, the Cyclops is a cannibal. Man inquires, searches, designs, constructs, advances, in a word, is progressive; the Cyclops simply uses the shelter and the food that nature finds for him, and is thoroughly stationary. Yet, while man is subject to death, the Cyclops lives on, or vegetates at least, and transmits the privileges of his race by virtue of its high original. The moral element has been entirely dismissed. Polyphemus is a huge mass of force, seasoned perhaps with cunning, certainly with falseness. This union of a superhuman life with the brutal that dwells in solitude, and has none of its angles rubbed down by the mutual contact between members of a race, produces a mixed result of extreme ferocity, childishness, and a kind of horrible glee, which, as a work of art, is most striking and successful."-P. 318.

His remarks on many of the chief characters, both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, are such as display a highly cultivated taste, and a refined sympathy with what is noblest or most delicate in such characters. Achilles, Hector, Nausicaa, are all gracefully described; more grace is thrown over them than we should perhaps find in the poet. The whole heroic age in which Homer lived, and which his poetry reflects, is dealt with, at times, in a very indulgent strain. We cannot forget certain unmistakable traits of ferocity which Mr Gladstone himself occasionally recalls; we cannot disguise from ourselves, for a moment, that Greece made a most conspicuous progress, in morals as well as intellect, in the interval between Homer and Pericles. But still there are certain strong, hardy, spon

age

taneous virtues of this heroic which it is well to contemplate, and which do honour to our common humanity. Such a passage as the following exhibits at least one phase of this heroic epoch

:

"The Greek mind, which became one of the main factors of the civilised life

of Christendom, cannot be fully comprehended without the study of Homer, and is nowhere so vividly or so sincerely exhibited as in his works. He has a world of his own, into which, upon his strong wing, he carries us. There we find ourselves amidst a system of ideas, feelings, and actions, different from what are to be found anywhere else, and forming a new and distinct standard of humanity. Many among them seem as if they were then shortly about to be buried under a mass of ruins, in order that they might subsequently reappear, bright and fresh for application, among later generations of men. Others of them almost carry us back to the early morning of our race, the hours of its greater simplicity and purity, and more free intercourse with God. In much that this Homeric world exhibits, we see the taint of sin at work, but far, as yet, from its perfect work and its ripeness; it stands between Paradise and the vices of later heathenism, far from both, from the latter as well as the former; and if among all earthly knowledge the knowledge of man be that which we should chiefly court, and if to be genuine it should be founded upon experience, how is it possible to overvalue this primitive representative of the human race in a form complete, distinct, and separate, with its own religion, ethics, policy, history, arts, manners, fresh and true to the standard of its

nature, like the form of an infant from the hand of the Creator, yet mature, full, and finished, in its own sense, after its sculptor's art ?"-Vol. i. p. 6. own laws, like some masterpiece of the

Some of these studies on Homer, those particularly which occupy the third volume, are on separate individual subjects, remote from the leading theory which we have been examining; but we should not now have space to enter on them. We

have addressed ourselves to what forms the predominating subject of the work; and so much is it the predominating subject, that we venture to say that no one who is dissatisfied with Mr Gladstone as an interpreter of Greek mythology, will be so far propitiated by any other portion of the work as to rise from the whole with other feelings than those of weariness and disappoint

ment.

The last section of the work-with the exception of two articles which are reprinted from the Quarterly Review on Homer and his Successors,"

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