516 Notes for the Month. [Nov. 



prisoners female slaves is the same in both poems. No doubt this is, in some 

 degree so : the laws of war, more rigorous and cruel than those of peace, are also 

 more slow in their progress of modification. Nevertheless, the condition of 

 captive women though in both cases painful is differently described in the Iliad, 

 and in the Odyssey and with a variance which is not opposed to the hypothesis 

 of their advance (in the latter poem) in the general state of society. Now for 

 example the more free and happy the existence of women was at home, the more 

 odious and intolerable would slavery be to them. The higher and more honour- 

 able the rank assigned them by their husbands and lawful protectors, the greater 

 would be their horror of those masters to whose lot they fell as slaves, by right 

 of conquest. Thus in the Iliad, Briseis, whose father Achilles has slain, attaches 

 herself to the conqueror, without remorse or scruple : while, in the Odyssey, we 

 find a female prisoner driven forward even by blows but that very fact of rigorous 

 treatment supposes a resistance in the individual to the conqueror, of which the 

 Iliad exhibits no example. 



" The manner, too, in which the passion of love is occasionally spoken of, shews 

 a state which, with some of the virtues, has also the vices peculiar to civilization. 

 In the Odyssey, barbarous nations treat this passion grossly, but never jest upon 

 it. In the Iliad, the infidelity of Helen is treated solemnly. Menelaus is out- 

 raged ; but nobody finds in that outrage a subject for pleasantry. On the other 

 hand, the Mercury of the Odyssey, jesting with Apollo upon the account of Mars 

 and Venus, is a coxcomb, speaking in a society which refinement has already, to a 

 certain point, corrupted. 



" This is not all : the two poems are not distinguished merely by their moral 

 character : they differ in their literary style ; and that difference indicates in one 

 of them a state of society more advanced. 



" A unity of action, rendering a tale more simple and clear ; the concentration 

 of interest, which renders it more lively and more sustained ; these are the per- 

 fections of the narrative art; and these perfections are strangers to the Iliad. 

 The action is neither single nor continued. The interest is divided from the very 

 first book. Every hero shines in his turn ; and Achilles often is forgotten. 



" The character of the Odyssey, on the contrary, is that of perfect unity all 

 turns upon the restoration of Ulysses to his home. Ulysses, Telemachus, Penelope 

 these are the objects we are constantly interested for. Moreover, the tale is 

 told with superior art and arrangement. Repetitions are avoided more carefully 

 than in the Iliad. Ulysses, in the palace of Alcinous, having arrived at that part 

 of his history which the poet has already described, breaks off in the recital of 

 his adventures, in order that he may not relate that which has been told before." 



M. Constant then proceeds to examine the comparative poetical merits 

 of the two works, the Iliad and the Odyssey ; and he concludes also 

 upon this ground, as well as upon that which he terms the " fundamental 

 arrangement of the two poems, both with respect to religion, manners, 

 customs, morals, the state of women, and civil and political life," that it is 

 impossible they should have been written at the same time and by the same 

 hand. He goes farther into a discussion of considerable ingenuity, but 

 through which we cannot follow him, to shew that the very fact of the 

 constant increase of force and grandeur which distinguishes the Iliad as it 

 advances (some episodes excepted) from all other poems, is evidence that 

 it was not written or composed by one man, but by a succession of bards, 

 each of whom strove to surpass what had been performed by the other. 

 Upon this last point we think all analogy is against M. Constant ; but, 

 for the present, our limits compel us to quit the subject. 



From ancient inquiries, to turn for a little while to modern the man- 

 ner of writing what is called "History" in the present day, gets enter- 

 taining. A " History" now consists of one or two good thick volumes, 

 large octavo, published by some popular advertising bookseller ; and put 

 together by some writer whose opinions nobody cares a farthing about, and 

 whoso facts are compiled from the readiest undigested material that happens 



