hor some common scene of daily life worked out with
elaborate beauty. What the popular poet chooses for his illustrations
are as good a measure as we can have of the popular feeling, and the
images which he suggests are, of course, what he knows his hearers will
be pleased to dwell upon. There is much to be said about this, and we
shall return to it presently; in the meantime, we must not build on
indirect evidence. The designs on the shield of Achilles are, together,
a complete picture of Homer's microcosm; Homer surely never thought
inglorious or ignoble what the immortal art of Hephaistos condescended
to imitate.

The first groups of figures point a contrast which is obviously
intentional; and the significance becomes sadly earnest when we remember
who it was that was to bear the shield. The moral is a very modern one,
and the picture might be called by the modern name of Peace and War.
There are two cities, embodying in their condition the two ideas. In
one, a happy wedding is going forward; the pomp of the hymeneal
procession is passing along the streets; the air is full of music, and
the women are standing at their doors to gaze. The other is in the
terrors of a siege; the hostile armies glitter under the walls, the
women and children press into the defence, and crowd to the
battlements. In the first city, a quarrel rises, and wrong is made
right, not by violence and fresh wrong, but by the majesty of law and
order. The heads of the families are sitting gravely in the
market-place, the cause is heard, the compensation set, the claim
awarded. Under the walls of the other city an ambush lies, like a wild
beast on the watch for its prey. The unsuspecting herdsmen pass on with
their flocks to the waterside; the spoilers spring from their
hiding-place, and all is strife, and death, and horror, and confusion.
If there were other war-scenes on the shield, it might be doubted
whether Homer intended so strong a contrast as he executed; but fighting
for its own sake was evidently held in slight respect with him. The
forms of life which were really beautiful to him follow in a series of
exquisite Rubens-like pictures: harvest scenes and village festivals;
the ploughing and the vintage, or the lion-hunt on the reedy margin of
the river; and he describes them with a serene, sunny enjoyment which no
other old world art or poetry gives us anything in the least resembling.
Even we ourselves, in our own pastorals, are struggling w