t any notice of the domestic pictures, of
which there are so many, in the palaces of Ulysses, of Nestor, or of
Alcinous; of the games, so manly, yet, in point of refinement, so
superior even to those of our own middle ages; of the supreme good of
life as the Greeks conceived it, and of the arts by which they
endeavoured to realise that good. It is useless to notice such things
briefly, and the detail would expand into a volume. But the impression
which we gather from them is the same which we have gathered all
along--that if the proper aim of all human culture be to combine, in the
highest measure in which they are compatible, the two elements of
refinement and of manliness, then Homer's age was cultivated to a degree
the like of which the earth has not witnessed since. There was more
refinement under Pericles, as there is more in modern London and Paris;
but there was, and there is, infinitely more vice. There was more
fierceness (greater manliness there never was) in the times of
feudalism. But take it for all in all, and in a mere human sense, apart
from any other aspect of the world which is involved in Christianity, it
is difficult to point to a time when life in general was happier, and
the character of man set in a more noble form. If we have drawn the
picture with too little shadow, let it be allowed for. The shadow was
there, doubtless, though we see it only in a few dark spots. The
Margites would have supplied the rest, but the Margites, unhappily for
us, is lost. Even heroes have their littlenesses, and Comedy is truer to
the details of littleness than Tragedy or Epic. The grand is always more
or less ideal, and the elevation of a moment is sublimed into the spirit
of a life. Comedy, therefore, is essential for the representing of men;
and there were times, doubtless, when the complexion of Agamemnon's
greatness was discoloured, like Prince Henry's, by remembering, when he
was weary, that poor creature--small beer--_i.e._ if the Greeks had got
any.

A more serious discoloration, however, we are obliged to say that we
find in Homer himself, in the soil or taint which even he is obliged to
cast over the position of women. In the Iliad, where there is no sign of
male slavery, women had already fallen under the chain, and though there
does not seem to have been any practice of polygamy, the female
prisoners fell, as a matter of course, into a more degraded position. It
is painful, too, to observe that their own f