which has a special and simple beauty of its own. When Laertes seems yet incredulous as to his son's identity, Ulysses reminds him how, when he was yet a child, following his father about the orchards, and begging with a child's pertinacity, he had given him "for his very own a certain number of apple, fig, and pear trees and vines-all which he can still remember and enumerate. The token is irresistible, and the old man all but faints for joy.

An attempt at rebellion on the part of some of his Ithacan subjects, who are enraged at his slaughter of their nobles, and which is headed by the father of the dead Antinous, fails to revive the fading interest of the tale. The ringleader falls by a spear cast by the trembling hand of Laertes, and the malcontents submit, after a brief contest, to their lawful chief.

A hint of future travel for the hero leaves his history in some degree still incomplete. A penance had been imposed upon him by the seer Tiresias, by which alone he could appease Neptune for the cruel injury inflicted on his son, the giant Polyphemus. He must seek out some people who had never seen the sea, and never eaten salt, and there offer sacrifice to the god. Then, and only then, he might hope to reign for the rest of his life in peace amongst his islanders. Of the fulfilment of this pilgrimage the poet tells us nothing. Other legends represent Ulysses as meeting his death at last from the hand of his own son Telegonus (born of his amour with Circe), who had landed in the island of Ithaca on a piratical enterprise. We may remark the coincidence—or the imitation-in the later legend of

the British Arthur, who is slain in battle by his illegitimate son Mordred. The veil which even tradition leaves hanging over the great wanderer's fate is no inappropriate conclusion to his story. A life of inaction, even in his old age, seems hardly suited to the poetical conception of this hero of unrest. In the fragmentary legends of the Middle Ages there is almost material for a second Odyssey. There, the Greek voyager becomes the pioneer of Atlantic discoverers-sailing still on into the unknown West in search of the Earthly Paradise, founding new cities as he goes, and at last meeting his death in Atlantic waters. The Italian poets-Tasso, Pulci, and especially Dante-adopted the tradition. In the 'Inferno' of the latter, the spirit of Ulysses thus discloses the last scenes of his career :

"Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence

Of my old father, nor return of love,

That should have crowned Penelope with joy,
Could overcome in me the zeal I had

To explore the world, and search the ways of life,
Man's evil and his virtue. Forth I sailed

Into the deep illimitable main,

With but one bark, and the small faithful band
That yet cleaved to me. As Iberia far,

Far as Marocco, either shore I saw,
And the Sardinian and each isle beside

Which round that ocean bathes. Tardy with age
Were I and my companions, when we came
To the strait pass, where Hercules ordained
The boundaries not to be o'erstepped by man.

The walls of Seville to my right I left,
On the other hand already Ceuta past.

"O brothers!' I began, 'who to the west

*The Straits of Gibraltar.

*

Through perils without number now have reached;
To this the short remaining watch, that yet

Our senses have to wake, refuse not proof
Of the unpeopled world, following the track
Of Phoebus. Call to mind from whence ye sprang :
Ye were not formed to live the life of brutes,
But virtue to pursue and knowledge high.'
With these few words I sharpened for the voyage
The mind of my associates, that I then
Could scarcely have withheld them. To the dawn
Our poop we turned, and for the witless flight
Made our oars wings,* still gaining on the left.
Each star of the other pole night now beheld,
And ours so low, that from the ocean floor
It rose not. Five times re-illumed, as oft
Vanished the light from underneath the moon,
Since the deep way we entered, when from far
Appeared a mountain dim, loftiest methought
Of all I e'er beheld. Joy seized us straight;
But soon to mourning changed. From the new land
A whirlwind sprung, and at her foremost side
Did strike the vessel. Thrice it whirled her round
With all the waves; the fourth time lifted up
The poop, and sank the prow: so fate decreed:
And over us the booming billow closed."

-Inferno, xxvi. (Cary's transl.)

Thus also Mr Tennyson-drawing from Dante not. less happily than he so often does from Homer-makes his Ulysses resign the idle sceptre into the hands of the home-keeping Telemachus, and tempt the seas once more in quest of new adventures :

"There lies the port: the vessel puffs her sail :

There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me,
That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

* The metaphor is Homer's, Odyss. xi. 124.

Free hearts, free foreheads-you and I are old: Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all, but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done.

"Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows: for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew."

THE resemblance which these Homeric poems bear, in many remarkable features, to the romances of mediæval chivalry, has been long ago remarked, and has already been incidentally noticed in these pages. The peculiar caste of kings and chiefs-or kings and knights, as they are called in the Arthurian and Carlovingian tales-before whom the unfortunate "churls" tremble and fly like sheep, is a feature common to both. "Then were they afraid when they saw a knight"—is the pregnant sentence which, in Mallory's 'King Arthur,' reveals a whole volume of social history; for the knight, in the particular instance, was but riding quietly along, and there ought to have been no reason why the "churls" should dread the sight of a professed redresser of grievances. But even so Ulysses condescends to use no argument to this class but the active use of his staff; and Achilles dreads above all things dying "the death of a churl" drowned in a brook. It is only the noble, the priest, and the divine bard who emerge into the light of romance. The lives and feelings of the mere