e his
flock was heard by the shepherd going out in the morning to pasture,' we
have, perhaps, some tale of a Phoenician mariner, who had wandered
into the North Seas, and seen 'the Norway sun set into sunrise.' But
what shall we say to that Syrian isle, 'where disease is not, nor
hunger, nor thirst, and where, when men grow old, Apollo comes with
Artemis, and slays them with his silver bow?' There is nothing in the
Iliad like any of these stories.

Yet, when all is said, it matters little who wrote the poems. Each is
so magnificent, that to have written both could scarcely have increased
the greatness of the man who had written one; and if there were two
Homers, the earth is richer by one more divine-gifted man than we had
known. After all, it is perhaps more easy to believe that the
differences which we seem to see arise from Homer's own choice of the
material which best suited two works so different, than that nature was
so largely prodigal as to have created in one age and in one people two
such men; for whether one or two, the authors of the Iliad and the
Odyssey stand alone with Shakespeare far away above mankind.

FOOTNOTES:

[X] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1851.

[Y] Mackay's _Progress of the Intellect_.

THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS.

1850.

If the enormous undertaking of the Bollandist editors had been
completed, it would have contained the histories of 25,000 saints. So
many the Catholic Church acknowledged and accepted as her ideals--as men
who had not only done her honour by the eminence of their sanctity, but
who had received while on earth an openly divine recognition of it in
gifts of supernatural power. And this vast number is but a selection;
the editors chose only out of the mass before them what was most
noteworthy and trustworthy, and what was of catholic rather than of
national interest. It is no more than a fraction of that singular
mythology which for so many ages delighted the Christian world, which is
still held in external reverence among the Romanists, and of which the
modern historians, provoked by its feeble supernaturalism, and by the
entire absence of critical ability among its writers to distinguish
between fact and fable, have hitherto failed to speak a reasonable word.
Of the attempt in our own day to revive an interest in them we shall say
little in this place. The 'Lives' have no form or beauty to give them
attraction in themselves; and for their human interest the broad
atmosph