waters in indissoluble union with those of the fountain it loves. But where natural objects are not thus strikingly individualized-where the mind can at once recognise, in a multitude of things, one and the same power of affecting human interests its tendency is not to deify the objects, but to place a deity over them, who, being invisible, rules from a distance a whole class of phenomena. Bread and wine are great and beneficent powers, but the blindest fetish-worshipper never probably offered prayer or sacrifice to an individual loaf or wine-flask, but to an invisible Bacchus or Ceres, whose body, being unseen, is naturally assimilated to the human, and who is thenceforth handed over to the poets to exalt and dignify. Thus the first and most obvious step in the generalization of nature, by arranging objects in classes, is accompanied by a corresponding generalization of the gods. Fire, being a more mysterious as well as a more terrible agent, has, in some religions, been an object of direct worship; but in Homer we find the transition completely effected from the worship of fire to that of the fire-god, Vulcan. Thunder, the most awful of all, was universally received as the attribute of the most powerful of deities, the ruler of gods and men. As thought advanced, not only all physical agencies capable of ready generalization, as Night, Morning, Sleep, Death, together with the more obvious of the great emotional agencies, Beauty, Love, War, but by degrees also the ideal products of a higher abstraction, as Wisdom, Justice, and the like, were severally accounted the work and manifestation of as many special divinities. It became,' as Müller* expresses it, a general habit "to concentrate every form of spiritual existence, whose unity was recognised, into an apex, which necessarily appeared to the mind as a personal entity. Can it be imagined that Aix, • Θέμις, Μῆτις, Μοῦσα, Χάρις, Ηβη, Εριννύς, "Ερις, could have attained a generally believed reality, and even in some measure divine worship, otherwise than through a necessity, grounded on the epoch of mental development, to contemplate in this manner as a unity, not only every aspect of nature, but also • of human life? How were it possible to pray to Charis, if she were only viewed as a predicate of human or higher na*tures? It is even wrong to consider the worship paid by the Romans to Virtus, Felicitas, &c., as allegorical in the strict 6 sense; for then it could be no worship at all.' 6 * Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, (p. 61,) recently and very well translated by Mr Leitch. Assuredly, these objects of worship were not conceived as ideas, but as persons, whose fundamental attributes, however, necessarily ran in close analogy to those of the ideas which they embodied. Such is the primitive type of polytheism a thing of no human invention, but, in the strictest sense of the word, natural, and of spontaneous growth. Afterwards, indeed, poets and priests did invent stories concerning the gods, more or less connected or consistent with their original attributes, which stories became incorporated with religion; and the most popular deities were those concerning whom the most impressive stories had been feigned. But the legends did not make the religion; the basis of that was a bona fide personification and divinization of the occult causes of phenomena. In these views we have no reason to think that we at all differ from Mr Grote; but if there is any point in which his expositions do not quite satisfy us, it is, that they do not bring out strongly enough this part of the case; that the Greek religion appears in them too much as a sort of accident, the arbitrary creation of poets and storytellers; its origin in the natural human faculties and the spontaneous tendencies of the uncultivated intellect, being indicated indeed, but not placed in a sufficiently strong light. With this exception, we can hardly bestow too much praise on this portion of Mr Grote's performance. He has overcome the difficulty, so great to a modern imagination, of entering intelligently into the polytheistic frame of mind and conception of nature. In no treatise which we could mention, certainly in no work connected with Grecian history, do we find so thorough a comprehension of that state of the human intellect in which the directly religious interpretation of nature is paramount-in which every explanation of phenomena, that refers them to the personal agency of a hidden supernatural power, appears natural and probable, and every other mode of accounting for them incredible—where miracles are alone plausible, and explanation by natural causes is not only offensive to the reverential feelings of the hearer, but actually repugnant to his reason, so contrary is it to the habitual mode of interpreting phenomena. A state of mind made perfectly intelligible by our knowledge of the Hindoos; and nowhere better exhibited than in the pictures given by near observers of that curious people, who reproduce in so many respects the mental characteristics of the infancy of the human race.* *It is much to be regretted that so few such pictures are extant. We recommend, as one of the most instructive, the work, already referred to, of Colonel Sleeman-a book which may be called, without exaggeration, The Hindoos painted by themselves. Though many topics discussed in Mr Grote's volumes are more important, there is none more interesting, than the authorship of the Homeric poems; regarded by all antiquity as the production of one great poet, (or at most two, for the Iliad and Odyssey), but which the scepticism of a recent period has pronounced to be compilations made as late as the time of Pisistratus, from a multitudinous assemblage of popular ballads. Now, however, that the Wolfian hypothesis seems nearly abandoned in the country in which it arose, the notion that such productions could have been manufactured by piecing and dovetailing a number of short poems, originally distinct, may be ranked along with many other conceits of learned ingenuity, in the class of psychological curiosities. We are aware of no argument on the Wolfian side of the controversy which really deserves any weight, except the difficulty of conceiving that such long poems could have been composed and handed down to posterity by memory alone; for that they were produced prior to the use of writing, is certain, from many considerations,* and especially from the absence of the smallest allusion to such an art in the whole eight-and-forty books; though so full of notices and descriptions of almost every useful or ornamental process which can be supposed to have been in existence in that early age, that they have been said to be a summary of all the knowledge of the time. The preservation of such works, without help from writing, is no doubt, at the first aspect of the matter, surprising; but only because in this, as in so many other things, we antedate our modern experience, and apply to early ages the limited standard of our own. It is well said by Plato in the Phædrus, that the invention of letters was the great enfeebler of memory. In our time, when the habit is formed of recording all things in permanent characters, and when every one relies, not on memory, but on the substitutes for it, we can scarcely form an idea of what its intrinsic powers must have been, when exercised and cultivated as a thing to be solely depended upon. Between the remembering faculties of the Homerids of Chios, and those of our degenerate days, there was doubtless as great a difference as between the powers of eye and ear of a North American Indian and those of a London citizen. Nor was it, after all, more difficult to retain a single poem of twenty-four books, than twenty-four poems of one book each, * These are fully set forth by Mr Grote, pp. 191 to 197 of his second volume, and by Müller, History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, pp. 37 to 39. which is much less than must have formed the stock in trade of any celebrated ordos. As for the poet himself, he doubtἀοιδός. less, as he proceeded in the composition, wrote his poem, as it were, on the memory of the younger bards, by whom it is consonant to the manners of that age that he should have been surrounded. Those who assert the essential unity of the Homeric poems, by no means deny that there may have been, and probably were, interpolations, and even additions of some length, made either by the same or by other poets, to the original plan. This is the ground taken by Mr Grote. He rejects the Pisistratean hypothesis. He maintains, from internal evidence, the complete unity of plan and authorship in the Odyssey. He claims a like unity for the greater part of the Iliad; but argues for an amount of subsequent addition to the poem greater than we can bring ourselves to consider probable. We shall give in his own words, what is peculiar to his theory : The first book, together with the eighth, and the books from the eleventh to the twenty-second inclusive, seem to form the primary organization of the poem, then properly an Achilleis: the twenty-third and twenty-fourth books are additions at the tail of this primitive poem, which still leave it nothing more than an enlarged Achilleis: but the books from the second to the seventh inclusive, together with the tenth, are of a wider and more comprehensive character, and convert the poem from an Achilleis into an Iliad. The primitive frontispiece, inscribed with the anger of Achilles and its direct consequences, yet remains, after it has ceased to be coextensive with the poem. The parts added, however, are not necessarily inferior in merit to the original poem; so far is this from being the case, that amongst them are comprehended some of the noblest efforts of the Grecian epic. Nor are they more recent in date than the original; strictly speaking, they must be a little more recent, but they belong to the same generation and state of society as the primitive Achilleis. Nothing can be more striking than the manner in which Homer concentrates our attention, in the first book, upon Achilles as the hero, his quarrel with Agamemnon, and the calamities of the Greeks, which are held out as about to ensue from it, through the intercession of Thetis with Zeus. But the incidents dwelt upon from the beginning of the second book down to the combat between Hector and Ajax in the seventh, animated and interesting as they are, do nothing to realize this promise; they are a splendid picture of the Trojan war generally, and eminently suitable to that larger title under which the poem has been immortalized; but the consequences of the anger of Achilles do not appear until the eighth book. The tenth book, or Doloneia, is also a portion of the Iliad, but not of the Achilleis; while the ninth book appears to be a subsequent addition (I venture to say, an unworthy addition), nowise harmonizing with that main stream of the Achilleis, which flows from the eleventh book to the twenty second. The eighth VOL. LXXXIV. NO. CLXX. 2 A t book ought to be read in immediate connexion with the eleventh, in order to see the structure of what seems the primitive Achilleis; for there are several passages in the eleventh and the following books, which prove that the poet who composed them could not have had present to his mind the main event of the ninth book-the outpouring of profound humiliation by the Greeks, and from Agamemnon especially, before Achilles, coupled with formal offers to restore Briseïs, and pay the amplest compensation for past wrong. The words of Achilles, (not less than those of Patroclus and Nestor,) in the eleventh and following books, plainly imply that the humiliation of the Greeks before him, for which he thirsts, is as yet future and contingent; that no plenary apology has yet been tendered, nor any offer made of restoring Briseis, while both Nestor and Patroclus, with all their wish to induce him to take arms, nevertheless view him as one whose ground of quarrel stands still the same as it did at the beginning. Moreover, if we look at the first book-the opening of the Achilleis-we shall see that this prostration of Agamemnon and the chief Grecian heroes before Achilles, would really be the termination of the whole poem; for Achilles asks nothing more from Thetis, nor Thetis any thing more from Zeus, than that Agamemnon and the Greeks may be brought to know the wrong that they have done to their capital warrior, and humbled to the dust in expiation of it. We may add, that the abject terror in which Agamemnon appears in the ninth book, when he sends the supplicatory message to Achilles, as it is not adequately accounted for by the degree of calamity which the Greeks have experienced in the preceding (eighth) book, so it is inconsistent with the gallantry and high spirit with which he strives at the beginning of the eleventh. The situation of the Greeks only becomes desperate when the three great chiefs, Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Diomedes, are disabled by wounds; this is the irreparable calamity which works upon Patroclus, and through him upon Achilles. The ninth book, as it now stands, seems to me an addition by a different hand to the original Achilleis, framed so as both to forestal and spoil the nineteenth book, which is the real reconciliation of the two inimical heroes. I will venture to add, that it carries the ferocious pride and egotism of Achilles beyond all admissible limits, and is shocking to that sentiment of Nemesis which was so deeply seated in the Grecian mind. We forgive any excess and fury against the Trojans and Hector after the death of Patroclus, but that he should remain unmoved by restitution, by abject supplications, and by the richest atoning presents tendered from the Greeks, indicates an implacability more than human, and certainly such as neither the poet of the first book, nor the poet of the last twelve books, seeks to portray. (Vol. ii. 234-44.) We are able to go so far with the distinction drawn by Mr Grote, as to admit that he has discriminated well between those parts of the Iliad which cannot have been additions to the original plan, and those which possibly may. If the poem does consist of an original basis and a subsequent enlargement, the books which he has pointed out, or some of them, must be the parts superadded. But that they, or even the ninth, to which he takes such |