who captured and traded off women
as they would horses or cows--on the ground that they were away from
their wives and were indulging in the "mildest and least licentious"
of all forms of adultery! Yet Gladstone was personally one of the
purest and noblest of men. Strange what somersaults a hobby ridden too
hard may induce a man to make in his ethical attitude!

ODYSSEUS, LIBERTINE AND RUFFIAN

If we now turn from the hero of the _Iliad_ to the hero of the
_Odyssey_, we find the same Gladstone declaring (II., 502) that "while
admitting the superior beauty of Calypso as an immortal, Ulysses
frankly owns to her that his heart is pining every day for Penelope;"
and in the shorter treatise he goes so far as to say (131), that

"the subject of the Odyssey gives Homer the opportunity
of setting forth the domestic character of Odysseus, in
his profound attachment to wife, child, and home, in
such a way as to adorn not only the hero, but his age
and race."

The "profound attachment" of Odysseus to his wife may be gauged in the
first place by the fact that he voluntarily remained away from her ten
years, fighting to recover, for another king, a worthless, adulterous
wench. Before leaving on this expedition, from which he feared he
might never return, he spoke to his wife, as she herself relates
(XVIII., 269), begging her to be mindful of his father and mother,
"and when you see our son a bearded man, then marry whom you will, and
leave the house now yours"--namely for the benefit of the son, for
whose welfare he was thus more concerned than for a monopoly of his
wife's love.

After the Trojan war was ended he embarked for home, but suffered a
series of shipwrecks and misfortunes. On the island of Aeaea he spent
a whole year sharing the hospitality and bed of the beautiful
sorceress Circe, with no pangs of conscience for such conduct, nor
thought of home, till his comrades, in spite of the "abundant meat and
pleasant wine," longed to depart and admonished him in these words:
"Unhappy man, it is time to think of your native land, if you are
destined ever to be saved and to reach your home in the land of your
fathers." Thus they spoke and "persuaded his manly heart." In view of
the ease with which he thus abandoned himself for a whole year to a
life of indulgence, till his comrades prodded his conscience, we may
infer that he was not so very unwilling a prisoner afterward, of the
beautiful nymph Ca