rs, without a friend, without a counsellor, and with even a
child whose constancy was wavering. It is obvious that Homer designed
this contrast. The story of the Argos tragedy is told again and again.
The shade of Agamemnon himself forebodes a fate like his own to Ulysses.
It is Ulysses's first thought when he wakes from his sleep to find
himself in his own land; and the scene in Hades, in the last book, seems
only introduced that the husband of Clytemnestra may meet the shades of
the Ithacan suitors, and learn, in their own tale of the sad issue of
their wooing, how far otherwise it had fared with Ulysses than with
himself. Women, therefore, according to Homer, were as capable of heroic
virtue as men were, and the ideal of this heroism is one to which we
have scarcely added.

For the rest, there is no trace of any oriental seraglio system. The
sexes lived together in easy unaffected intercourse. The ladies appeared
in society naturally and gracefully, and their chief occupations were
household matters, care of clothes and linen, and other domestic
arrangements. When a guest came, they prepared his dressing-room,
settled the bath, and arranged the convenience of his toilet-table. In
their leisure hours, they were to be found, as now, in the hall or the
saloon, and their work-table contained pretty much the same materials.
Helen was winding worsted as she entertained Telemachus, and Andromache
worked roses in very modern cross-stitch. A literalist like Mr. Mackay,
who finds out that the Israelites were cannibals, from such expressions
as 'drinking the blood of the slain,' might discover, perhaps, a similar
unpleasant propensity in an excited wish of Hecuba, that she might eat
the heart of Achilles; but in the absence of other evidence, it is
unwise in either case to press a metaphor; and the food of ladies,
wherever Homer lets us see it, is very innocent cake and wine, with such
fruits as were in season. To judge by Nausicaa, their breeding must have
been exquisite. Nausicaa standing still, when the uncouth figure of
Ulysses emerged from under the wood, all sea slime and nakedness, and
only covered with a girdle of leaves--standing still to meet him when
the other girls ran away tittering and terrified, is the perfect
conception of true female modesty; and in the whole scene between them,
Homer shows the most finished understanding of the delicate and
tremulous relations which occur occasionally in the accidents of
inter