or glory--the one glory worth caring for
only to be won upon the battle-field, and their exploits the one worthy
theme of the poet's song. This is our boyish impression, and, like other
such, it is very different from the truth. If war had been a passion
with the Ionians, as it was with the Teutons and the Norsemen, the god
of battles would have been supreme in the Pantheon; and Zeus would
scarcely have called Ares the most hateful spirit in Olympus--most
hateful, _because_ of his delight in war and carnage. Mr. Carlyle looks
forward to a chivalry of labour. He rather wishes than expects that a
time may come when the campaign of industry against anarchic nature may
gather into it those feelings of gallantry and nobleness which have
found their vent hitherto in fighting only. The modern man's work, Mr.
Carlyle says, is no longer to splinter lances or break down walls, but
to break soil, to build barns and factories, and to find a high
employment for himself in what hitherto has been despised as degrading.
How to elevate labour--how to make it beautiful--how to enlist the
_spirit_ in it (for in no other way can it be made humanly profitable),
that is the problem which he looks wistfully to the future to solve for
us. He may look to the past as well as to the future; in the old Ionia
he will find all for which he wishes. The wise Ulysses built his own
house, and carved his own bed. Princes killed and cooked their own
food. It was a holy work with them--their way of saying grace for it;
for they offered the animal in his death to the gods, and they were not
butchers, but sacrificing priests. Even a keeper of swine is called
noble, and fights like a hero; and the young princess of Phoeacia--the
loveliest and gracefullest of Homer's women--drove the clothes-cart and
washed linen with her own beautiful hands. Not only was labour free--for
so it was among the early Romans; or honourable, so it was among the
Israelites,--but it was beautiful--beautiful in the artist's sense, as
perhaps elsewhere it has never been. In later Greece--in what we call
the glorious period--toil had gathered about it its modern crust of
supposed baseness--it was left to slaves; and wise men, in their
philosophic lecture-rooms, spoke of it as unworthy of the higher
specimens of cultivated humanity.

But Homer finds, in its most homely forms, fit illustrations for the
most glorious achievements of his heroes; and in every page we find, in
simile or metap