dry in the summer. Dr. Clarke
successfully combats the opinion of those who make the Scamander to
have arisen from the springs of Bounabarshy, and traces the source
of the river to the highest mountain in the chain of Ida, now
Kusdaghy; receives the Simois in its course; towards its mouth it is
very muddy, and flows through marshes. Between the Scamander and
Simois, Homer's Troy is supposed to have stood: this river,
according to Homer, was called Xanthus by the gods, Scamander by
men. The waters of the Scamander had the singular property of giving
a beautiful colour to the hair or wool of such animals as bathed in
them; hence the three goddesses, Minerva, Juno, and Venus, bathed
there before they appeared before Paris to obtain the golden apple:
the name Xanthus, "yellow," was given to the Scamander, from the
peculiar colour of its waters, still applicable to the Mendere, the
yellow colour of whose waters attracts the attention of travellers.
99 It should be "his _chest_ like Neptune." The torso of Neptune, in
the "Elgin Marbles," No. 103, (vol. ii. p. 26,) is remarkable for
its breadth and massiveness of development.
100 "Say first, for heav'n hides nothing from thy view."
--"Paradise Lost," i. 27.
"Ma di' tu, Musa, come i primi danni
Mandassero a Cristiani, e di quai parti:
Tu 'l sai; ma di tant' opra a noi si lunge
Debil aura di fama appena giunge."
--"Gier. Lib." iv. 19.
101 "The Catalogue is, perhaps, the portion of the poem in favour of
which a claim to separate authorship has been most plausibly urged.
Although the example of Homer has since rendered some such formal
enumeration of the forces engaged, a common practice in epic poems
descriptive of great warlike adventures, still so minute a
statistical detail can neither be considered as imperatively
required, nor perhaps such as would, in ordinary cases, suggest
itself to the mind of a poet. Yet there is scarcely any portion of
the Iliad where both historical and internal evidence are more
clearly in favour of a connection from the remotest period, with the
remainder of the work. The composition of the Catalogue, whensoever
it may have taken p
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