The Zoologist— Febeuary, 1869. 1539 



Homer. Of his transcendent merits it were idle to speak, for one of 

 our own greatest writers has said that "beyond a doubt he was the 

 most exalted and universal genius the world has seen." Subsequent 

 Greek poets, as ^schjlus, Aristophanes and others, are so eclipsed and 

 overshadowed by the gigantic genius of Homer, that talent unequalled 

 elsewhere, except perhaps among the Jews, seems dwarfed into insig- 

 nificance. Of Grecian painters we know little, yet that little is very 

 grand : Apelles lived in the time of Alexander, twenty-one centuries 

 ago, and one of Ins pictures existed in the age of Augustus, and was 

 purchased by that emperor to adorn the temple of Julius, by the 

 remission of the entire tribute paid by the island of Cos, of which 

 Apelles was a native : tlie picture was called the Venus Anadyomene, 

 and represented the goddess as emerging from a shell 6oating on 

 the ocean ; but the skill of Apelles was not exhibited alone in painting 

 the human figure, for he painted animals also, and dogs with so great 

 truthfulness that living dogs are said to have supposed them realities, 

 and stopped to quarrel with the inanimate canvas. Of Grecian Sculp- 

 ture examples still exist, and the names of Phidias and Praxiteles have 

 become synonymous with unrivalled excellence. Of Architecture the 

 Temple of Theseus, and similar buildings which we have despoiled and 

 defaced, still attest the supremacy of Greece. In History the names 

 of Herodotus and Thucydides yet stand unrivalled, and in Astronomy 

 that of Thales : twenty centuries ago that great philosopher calculated 

 eclipses with a precision that induced some to worship him as a god 

 and others to condemn him as a sorcerer. Aristotle has always been 

 called the father of Natural History. Solon, Plato and Socrates are 

 the great teachers of Moral Philosophy. Lastly, in War, the names 

 of Troy and Thermopylae, of the Granicus, Issus and Arbela, are 

 sufficient evidence of the proficiency of Greece. 

 What is Greece now ? 



He who hath bent him o'er the dead 

 Ere the first day of death is fled, 

 The first darls day of nothingness, 

 The last of danger and distress, 

 (Befure decay's effacing fingers 

 Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,) 

 And marked the mild angelic air, 

 The rapture of repose that's there, 

 The fixed yet tender traits that streak 

 The langour of the placid cheek. 

 And — but for that sad shrouded eye. 



