thing else excite and interest his audience: his lay must be rich in incident; and to an audience who were all more or less warlike, no incidents could be so exciting as the details of battle. There is much savageness in Homer's combats; but savageness is to the taste of men whose only means of excitement is through their grosser senses, and a love of the horrible in fact or fiction is by no means extinct even in our own day.

Young Antilochus, the son of Nestor's old age, draws the first blood in the battle. He kills Echepolus. "Beneath his horsehair-plumèd helmet's peak

The sharp spear struck; deep in his forehead fixed,
It pierced the bone: then darkness veiled his eyes,
And, like a tower, amid the press he fell."

off to strip his arThe armour of a

Over his dead body the combat grows furious-the Greeks endeavouring to drag him mour, the Trojans to prevent it. vanquished enemy was, in these combats, something like what an enemy's scalp is to the Indian "brave;" to carry it off in triumph, and hang it up in their own tents as a trophy, was the great ambition of the slayer and his friends. Ajax, too, slays his man-spearing him right through from breast to shoulder: and the tall Trojan falls like a poplar

"Which with his biting axe the wheelwright fells." Ulysses, roused by the death of a friend who is killed in trying to carry off this last body, rushes to the front, and poising his spear, looks round to choose his victim. The foremost of his enemies recoil; but he drives his weapon right through the temples of Demophoon, a natural son of Priam, as he sits high in his chariot. The Trojans waver; even Hector gives ground; the Greeks cheer, and some carry off the bodies, while the

rest press forward. It is going hard with Troy, when Apollo, who sits watching the battle from the citadel, calls loudly to their troops to remember that "there is no Achilles in the field to-day." So the fight is renewed, Minerva cheering on the Greeks, as Apollo does the Trojans.

Diomed, the gallant son of Tydeus, now becomes the hero of the day. His exploits occupy, indeed, so large a portion of the next book of the poem, that it was known as "The Deeds of Diomed," and would form, according to one theory, a separate romance or lay of itself, exactly as some portions of the Arthurian romance have for their exclusive hero some one renowned Knight of the Round Table, as Tristram or Lancelot. Diomed fights under supernatural colours. Minerva herself not only inspires him with indomitable courage, but sheds over his whole person a halo of celestial radiance before which the bravest Trojan might well recoil— "Forth from his helm and shield a fiery light

There flashed, liked autumn's star, that brightest shines
When newly risen from his ocean bath."

He

Once more the prince of archers, Pandarus the Lycian, comes to the rescue of the discomfited Trojans. bends his bow against Diomed, who is now fighting on foot, and the arrow flies true to its mark. He sees it strike deep into the shoulder, and the red blood streams out visibly over the breastplate. Elated by his success, he turns round and shouts his triumphant rallying-cry to the Trojans "The bravest of the Greeks is wounded to the death!" But his exultation is premature. Diomed gets him back to his chariot, and calls on his faithful friend and charioteer Sthenelus to draw the arrow from the wound. The blood wells out fast, as

the barb is withdrawn ; but the hero puts up a brief prayer to his guardian goddess for strength yet to avenge him of his adversary, whose exulting boast he has just heard. Minerva hears. By some rapid celestial pharmacy she heals the wound at once, and gives him fresh strength and vigour, adding these words of encouragement and warning:

"Go fearless onward, Diomed, to meet

The Trojan hosts; for I within thy breast
Thy father's dauntless courage have infused,
Such as of old in Tydeus' bosom dwelt,

Bold horseman, buckler-clad; and from thine eyes
The film that dimmed them I have purged away,*
That thou mayest well 'twixt gods and men discern.
If then some god make trial of thy force,
With other of the Immortals fight thou not;

But should Jove's daughter Venus dare the fray,
Thou need'st not shun at her to cast thy spear." (D.)

With redoubled vigour and fury the hero returns to the battle; and again the Trojans' names, to each of which the poet contrives to give some touch of individual character, swell the list of his victims. Æneas marks his terrible career, and goes to seek for Pandarus. He points out to him the movements of the Greek champion, and bids him try upon his person the farfamed skill that had so nearly turned the fate of war in the case of Menelaus. Pandarus tells him of his late unsuccessful attempt, and declares his full belief

* The idea is borrowed by Milton in a well-known passage ;"To nobler sights

Michael from Adam's eyes the film removed

Which that false fruit, which promised clearer sight,

Had bred; then purged with euphrasy and rue

The visual nerve, for he had much to see."

-Par. Lost, xi. 411.

that some glamour of more than mortal power has made Diomed invulnerable to human weapons. He bitterly regrets, as he tells Æneas, that he did not follow the counsels of his father Lycaon, and bring with him to the campaign, like other chiefs of his rank, some of those noble steeds of whom eleven pair stand always in his father's stalls, "champing the white barley and the spelt." He had feared, in truth, that they might lack provender in the straits of the siege:

"Woe worth the day, when from the glittering wall,
Hector to serve, I took my shafts and bow,
And to fair Ilion, from my father's hall,
Captain of men, did with my Lycians go!

If ever I return, if ever I know

My country, my dear wife, my home again,

Let me fall headless to an enemy's blow,

Save the red blaze of fire these arms contain!" (W.)

Æneas bids him mount with him into his chariot, and together they will encounter this redoubtable Greek. Pandarus takes the spear and shield, while Æneas guides the horses. Diomed is still fighting on foot, when Sthenelus, who attends him with the chariot, sees the two hostile chiefs bearing down upon him. He begs his comrade to remount, and avoid the encounter with two such adversaries. Diomed indignantly refuses. He will slay both, with the help of Heaven; and he charges Sthenelus, if such should be the happy result, to leave his own horses and chariot, securing the reins carefully to the chariot-front, and make prize of the far-famed steeds of Æneas-they are descended from the immortal breed bestowed of old by Jupiter upon King Tros. So, on foot still, he awaits their onset. Pandarus stands high in the chariot

with poised weapon, and hails his enemy as he comes within hurling distance :—

"Prince, thou art met! though late in vain assailed,

The spear may enter where the arrow failed."

It does enter, and piercing through the tough ox-hide of the shield, stands fixed in the breastplate. Again, with premature triumph, he shouts exultingly to Diomed that at last he has got his death-wound. But the Greek quietly tells him that he has missed-which assuredly he himself is not going to do. He hurls his spear in turn with fatal aim: and the poet tells us with ghastly detail how it entered beneath the eyeball, and passed down through the "white teeth" and tongue

"Till the bright point looked out beneath the chin "— and Pandarus the Lycian closes his career, free at least from the baseness which medieval romances have attached to his name.

Æneas, in obedience to the laws of heroic chivalry, at once leaps down from the chariot to defend against all comers the body of his fallen comrade.

"And like a lion fearless in his strength

Around the corpse he stalked this way and that,
His spear and buckler round about him held,

To all who dared approach him threat'ning death." Diomed in this case avails himself of a mode of attack not uncommon with Homer's heroes. He seizes a huge stone-which not two men of this degenerate age (says Homer, with a poet's cynicism for the present) could have lifted and hurls it at the Trojan prince. It strikes him on the hip, crushes the joint, and brings him to his knees. But that his goddess-mother Venus comes to his rescue, the world had heard the last of Æneas, and