ollateral
dependencies,

'From the tale of Troy divine';

and from Homer was derived also the discrimination of the leading
characters, which, after all, were but coarsely and rudely
discriminated; at least, for the majority. In one instance only we
acknowledge an exception. We have heard a great modern poet dwelling
with real and not counterfeit enthusiasm upon the character (or rather
upon the general picture, as made up both of character and position),
which the course of the _Iliad_ assigns gradually to Achilles. The
view which he took of this impersonation of human grandeur, combining
all gifts of intellect and of body, matchless speed, strength,
inevitable eye, courage, and the immortal beauty of a god, being also,
by his birth-right, half-divine, and consecrated to the imagination by
his fatal interweaving with the destinies of Troy, and to the heart by
the early death which to _his own knowledge_[9] impended over his
magnificent career, and so abruptly shut up its vista--the view, we
say, which our friend took of the presiding character throughout the
_Iliad_, who is introduced to us in the very first line, and who is
only eclipsed for seventeen books, to emerge upon us with more awful
lustre;--the view which he took was--that Achilles, and Achilles only,
in the Grecian poetry, was a great idea--an idealised creation; and we
remember that in this respect he compared the Homeric Achilles with
the Angelica of Ariosto. Her only he regarded as an idealisation in
the _Orlando Furioso_. And certainly in the luxury and excess of her
all-conquering beauty, which drew after her from 'ultimate Cathay' to
the camps of the baptised in France, and back again, from the palace
of Charlemagne, drew half the Paladins, and 'half Spain militant,' to
the portals of the rising sun; that sovereign beauty which (to say
nothing of kings and princes withered by her frowns) ruined for a time
the most princely of all the Paladins, the supreme Orlando, crazed him
with scorn,

'And robbed him of his noble wits outright'--

in all this, we must acknowledge a glorification of power not unlike
that of Achilles:--

'Irresistible Pelides, whom, unarm'd,
No strength of man or wild beast could withstand;
Who tore the lion as the lion tears the kid;
Ran on embattl'd armies clad in iron;
And, weaponless himself,
Made arms ridiculous, useless the forgery
Of brazen shield and spear, the hammer'd cuirass,