real hero; and every reader of the Paradise Lost must have felt, that in the Prince of Darkness, and Adam and Eve, the interest of the poem consists. The reason is, that the vices of the first, and the weakness of the two last, bring them nearer than any other characters in the poem to the standard of mortality; and we are so constituted, that we cannot take any great interest but in persons who share in our failings.

Perhaps the greatest cause of the sustained interest of the Iliad is the continued and vehement action which is maintained. The attention is seldom allowed to flag. Either in the council of the gods, the assembly of the Grecian or Trojan chiefs, or the contest of the leaders on the field of battle, an incessant interest is maintained. Great events are always on the wing: the issue of the contest is perpetually hanging, often almost even, in the balance. It is the art with which this is done, and a state of anxious suspense, like the crisis of a great battle kept up, that the great art of the poet consists. It is done by making the whole dramatic-bringing the characters forward constantly to speak for themselves, making the events succeed each other with almost breathless rapidity, and balancing success alternately from one side to the other, without letting it ever incline decisively to either. Tasso has adopted the same plan in his Jerusalem Delivered, and the contests of the Christian knights and Saracen leaders with the lance and the sword, closely resemble those of the Grecian and Trojan chiefs on the plain of Troy. Ariosto has carried it still further. The exploits of his Paladins-their adventures on earth, in air, and water; their loves, their sufferings, their victories, their dangerskeep the reader in a continual state of suspense. It is this sustained and varied interest which makes so many readers prefer the Orlando Furioso to the Jerusalem Delivered. But Ariosto has pushed it too far. In the search of variety, he has lost sight of unity. His heroes are not congregated round the banners of two rival potentates; there is no one object or interest in his poem. No narrow plain, like that watered by the Scaman

der, is the theatre of their exploits. Jupiter, from the summit of Gargarus, could not have beheld the contending armies. The most ardent imagination, indeed, is satiated with his adventures, but the closest attention can hardly follow their thread. Story after story is told, the exploits of knight after knight are recounted, till the mind is fatigued, the memory perplexed, and all general interest in the poem lost.

Milton has admirably preserved the unity of his poem; the grand and allimportant object of the fall of man could hardly admit of subordinate or rival interests. But the great defect in the Paradise Lost, arising from that very unity, is want of variety. It is strung throughout on too lofty a key; it does not come down sufficiently to the wants and cravings of mortality. The mind is awe-struck by the description of Satan careering through the immensity of space, of the battle of the angels, of the fall of Lucifer, of the suffering, and yet unsubdued spirit of his fellow rebels, of the adamantine gates, and pitchy darkness, and burning lake of hell. But after the first feeling of surprise and admiration is over, it is felt by all, that these lofty contemplations are not interesting to mortals like ourselves. They are too much above real life-too much out of the sphere of ordinary event and interest.

The fourth book is the real scene of interest in the Paradise Lost; it is its ravishing scenes of primeval innocence and bliss which have given it immortality. We are never tired of recurring to the bower of Eve, to her devotion to Adam, to the exquisite scenes of Paradise, its woods, its waters, its flowers, its enchantments. We are so, because we feel that it paints the Elysium to which all aspire, which all have for a brief period felt, but which none in this world can durably enjoy.

No one can doubt that Homer was endowed with the true poetic spirit, and yet there is very little of what we now call poetry in his writings. There is neither sentiment nor declamation

painting nor reflection. He is neither descriptive nor didactic. With great powers for portraying nature, as the exquisite choice of his epithets, and the occasional force of his

similes prove, he never makes any laboured attempt to delineate her features. He had the eye of a great painter; but his pictorial talents are employed, almost unconsciously, in the fervour of narrating events, or the animation of giving utterance to thoughts. He painted by an epithet or a line. Even the celebrated description of the fires in the plain of Troy, likened to the moon in a serene night, is contained in seven lines. His rosy-fingered morn-cloud-compelling Jupiter-Neptune, stiller of the waves-Aurora rising from her crocus bed--Night drawing her veil over the heavens-the black keel careering through the lashing waves

-the shout of the far-sounding sea -and the like, from which subsequent poets and dramatists have borrowed so largely, are all brief allusions, or epithets, which evidently did not form the main object of his strains. He was a close observer of nature-its lights, its shades, its storms and calms, its animals, their migrations, their cries and habits; but he never suspends his narrative to describe them. We shall look in vain in the Iliad, and even the Odyssey, for the lengthened pictures of scenery which are so frequent in Virgil and Tasso, and appear in such rich profusion in Milton. He describes storms only as objects of terror, not to paint them to the eye. Such things are to be found in the book of Job and in the Psalms, but with the same brevity and magical force of emphatic expression. There never was a greater painter of nature than Homer; there never was a man who aimed less at being so.

The portraying of character and event was the great and evident object of the Grecian bard; and there his powers may almost be pronounced unrivalled. He never tells you, unless it is sometimes to be inferred from an epithet, what the man's character that he introduces is. He trusts to the character to delineate itself. He lets us get acquainted with his heroes, as we do with persons around us, by hearing them speak, and seeing them act. In preserving character, in this dramatic way of representing it, he is unrivalled. He does not tell you that Nestor had the garrulity of age, and loved to recur to the events of his youth; but he never makes him

open his mouth without descanting on the adventures of his early years, and the degenerate race of mortals who have succeeded the paladins of former days. He does not tell us that Achilles was wrathful and impetuous; but every time he speaks, the anger of the son of Peleus comes boiling over his lips. He does not describe Agamemnon as overbearing and haughty; but the pride of the king of men is continually appearing in his words and actions, and it is the evident moral of the Iliad to represent its pernicious effects on the affairs of the Helenic confederacy. Ulysses never utters a word in which the cautious and prudent counsellor, sagacious in design but prompt in execution, wary in the council but decided in the field, far-seeing but yet persevering, is not apparent. Diomede never falters; alike in the field and the council he is indomitable. When Hector was careering in his chariot round their fortifications, and the king of men counselled retreat, he declared he would remain, were it only with Sthenelus and his friends. So completely marked, so well defined are his characters, though they were all rapacious chiefs at first sight, little differing from each other, that it has been observed with truth, that one well acquainted with the Iliad could tell, upon hearing one of the speeches read out without a name, who was the chief who uttered it.

The two authors, since his time, who have most nearly approached him in this respect, are Shakspeare and Scott. Both seem to have received the pencil which paints the human heart from nature herself. Both had a keen and searching eye for character in all grades and walks of life; and what is a general accompaniment of such a disposition, a strong sense of the ridiculous. Both seized the salient points in mental disposition, and perceived at a glance, as it were, the ruling propensity. Both impressed this character so strongly on their minds, that they threw themselves, as it were, into the very souls of the persons whom they delineated, and made them speak and act like nature herself. It is this extraordinary faculty of identifying themselves with their characters, and bringing out of their mouth the very words which, in real life, would have

come, which constitutes the chief and permanent attraction of these wonderful masters of the human heart. Cervantes had it in an equal degree; and thence it is that Homer, Shakspeare, Cervantes, and Scott, have made so great, and, to all appearance, durable impression on mankind. The human heart is, at bottom, every where the same. There is infinite diversity in the dress he wears, but the naked human figure of one country scarcely differs from another. The writers who have succeeded in reaching this deep substratum, this far-hidden but common source of human action, are understood and admired over all the world. It is the same on the banks of the Simoïs as on those of the Avon -on the Sierra Morena as the Scottish hills. They are understood alike in Europe as Asia-in antiquity as modern times; one unanimous burst of admiration salutes them from the North Cape to Cape Horn-from the age of Pisistratus to that of Napoleon.

Strange as it may appear to superficial observers, Cervantes bears a close analogy, in many particulars, to Homer. Circumstances, and an inherent turn for humour, made him throw his genius into an exquisite ridicule of the manners of chivalry; but the author of Don Quixote had in him the spirit of a great epic poet. His lesser pieces prove it; unequivocal traces of it are to be found in the adventures of the Knight of La Mancha himself. The elevation of mind which, amidst all his aberrations, appears in that erratic character; the incomparable traits of nature with which the work abounds; the faculty of describing events in the most striking way; of painting scenes in a few words; of delineating characters with graphic fidelity, and keeping them up with perfect consistency, which are so conspicuous in Don Quixote, are so many of the most essential qualities of an epic poet. Nor was the ardour of imagination, the romantic disposition, the brilliancy of fancy, the lofty aspirations, the tender heart, which form the more elevated and not less essential part of such a character, wanting in the Spanish novelist.

Sir Walter Scott more nearly resembles Homer than any poet who has sung since the siege of

Troy.

Not that he has produc any poem which will for a mome bear a comparison with the Iliad fine as the Lady of the Lake and Ma mion are, it would be the height national partiality to make any su comparison. But, nevertheless, S Walter's mind is of the same dimer sions as that of Homer. We see i him the same combination of natura sagacity with acquired information of pictorial eye with dramatic effect of observation of character with re flection and feeling; of graphic powe with poetic fervour; of ardour of imagination with rectitude of principle of warlike enthusiasm with pacific tenderness, which have rendered the Grecian bard immortal. It is in his novels, however, more than his poetry, that this resemblance appears; the author of Waverley more nearly approaches the blind bard than the author of the Lay. His romances in verse contain some passages which are sublime, many which are beautiful, some pathetic. They are all interesting, and written in the same easy, careless style, interspersed with the most homely and grotesque expressions, which is so well known to all the readers of the Iliad. The battle in Marmion is beyond all question, as Jeffrey long ago remarked, the most Homeric strife which has been sung since the days of Homer. But these passages are few and far between; his poems are filled with numerous and long interludes, written with little art, and apparently no other object but to fill up the pages or eke out the story. It is in prose that the robust strength, the powerful arm, the profound knowledge of the heart, appear; and it is there, accordingly, that he approaches at times so closely to Homer. If we could conceive a poem, in which the storming of Front-de-Bouf's castle in Ivanhoe the death of Fergus in Waverley-the storm on the coast, and death scene in the fisher's hut, in the Antiquary-the devoted love in the Bride of Lammermoor-the fervour of the Covenanters in Old Mortality, and the combats of Richard and Saladin in the Talisman, were united together, and intermingled with the incomparable characters, descriptions, and incidents with which these novels abound, they would form an epic poem.

The

Doubts have sometimes been expressed, as to whether the Iliad and Odyssey are all the production of one man. Never, perhaps, was doubt not merely so ill founded, but so decisively disproved by internal evidence. If ever in human composition the traces of one mind are conspicuous, they are in Homer. His beauties equally with his defects, his variety and uniformity, attest this. Never was an author who had so fertile an imagination for varying of incidents; never was one who expressed them in language in which the same words so constantly recur. This is the invariable characteristic of a great and powerful, but at the same time self-confident and careless mind. It is to be seen in the most remarkable manner in Bacon and Machiavel, and not a little of it may be traced both in the prose and poetical works of Scott. reason is, that the strength of the mind is thrown into the thought as the main object; the language, as a subordinate matter, is little considered. Expressions capable of energetically expressing the prevailing ideas of the imagination are early formed; but, when this is done, the powerful, careless mind, readily adopts them on all future occasions where they are at all applicable. There is scarcely a great and original thinker in whose writings the same expressions do not very frequently recur, often in exactly the same words. How much this is the case with Homer-with how much discrimination and genius his epithets and expressions were first chosen, and how frequently he repeats them, almost in every page, need be told to none who are acquainted with his writings. That is the most decisive mark at once of genius and identity. Original thinkers fall into repetition of expression, because they are always speaking from one model-their own thoughts. Subordinate writers avoid this fault, because they are speaking from the thoughts of others, and share their variety. It requires as great an effort for the first to introduce difference of expression, as for the last to reach diversity of thought.

The reader of Dante must not look for the heart-stirring and animated narrative-the constant interest-the breathless suspense, which hurries us along the rapid current of the

of

Iliad. There are no councils the gods; no messengers winging their way through the clouds; no combats of chiefs; no cities to storm; no fields to win. It is the infernal regions which the poet, under the guidance of his great leader, Virgil, visits; it is the scene of righteous retribution through which he is led; it is the apportionment of punishment and reward to crime or virtue, in this upper world, that he is doomed to witness. We enter the city of lamentation-we look down the depths of the bottomless pit--we stand at the edge of the burning lake. His survey is not a mere transient visit like that of Ulysses in Homer, or of Æneas in Virgil. He is taken slowly and deliberately through every successive circle of Malebolge; descending down which, like the visitor of the tiers of vaults, one beneath another, in a feudal castle, he finds every species of malefactors, from the chiefs and kings whose heroic lives were stained only by a few deeds of cruelty, to the depraved malefactors whose base course was unrelieved by one ray of virtue. In the very conception of such a poem, is to be found decisive evidence of the mighty change which the human mind had undergone since the expiring lays of poetry were last heard in the ancient world; of the vast revolution of thought and inward conviction which, during a thousand years, in the solitude of the monastery, and under the sway of a spiritual faith, had taken place in the human heart. A gay and poetic mythology no longer amazed the world by its fictions, or charmed it by its imagery. Religion no longer basked in the sunshine of imagination. The awful words of judgment to come had been spoken; and, like Felix, mankind had trembled. Ridiculous legends had ceased to be associated with the shades below-their place had been taken by images of horror. Conscience had resumed its place in the direction of thought. Superstition had lent its awful power to the sanctions of religion. Terror of future punishment had subdued the fiercest passionsinternal agony tamed the proudest spirits. It was the picture of a future world-of a world of retributionconceived under such impressions, that Dante proposed to give; it is that

which he has given with such terrible fidelity.

Melancholy was the prevailing characteristic of the great Italian's mind. It was so profound that it penetrated all his thoughts; so intense that it pervaded all his conceptions. Occasionally bright and beautiful ideas flitted across his imagination; visions of bliss, experienced for a moment, and then lost for ever, as if to render more profound the darkness by which they are surrounded. They are given with exquisite beauty; but they shine amidst the gloom like sunbeams struggling through the clouds. He inherited from the dark ages the austerity of the cloister; but he inherited with it the deep feelings and sublime conceptions which its seclusion had generated. His mind was a world within itself. He drew all his conceptions

from that inexhaustible source; but he drew them forth so clear and lucid, that they emerged, embodied as it were, in living images. His characters are emblematic of the various passions and views for which different degrees of punishment were reserved in the world to come; but his conception of them was so distinct, his description so vivid, that they stand forth to our gaze in all the agony of their sufferings, like real flesh and blood. We see them-we feel themwe hear their cries-our very flesh creeps at the perception of their sufferings. We stand on the edge of the lake of boiling pitch-we feel the weight of the leaden mantles--we see the snow-like flakes of burning sand-we hear the cries of those who had lost the last earthly consolations, the hope of death :-