presume had drawn from the same sources; but it is somewhat illustrative of the familiarity of the English mind with free institutions under the Plantagenets, that he speaks without effort or surprise of the 'parliament' of Troy. But we return to the so-called Shakspeare. Thersites is converted into the modern fool. Diomed struts upon his toes, while in Homer modesty is the peculiar ornament of his valour. Ajax, whom Homer has made lumpish and goodnatured, is full of haughty follies, the coxcomb of warriors; while the mere bulk, which, combined with bravery, formed his peculiar note, is made the distinctive characteristic of Achilles. It is still more grievous to find his relation to Patroclus degraded by foul insinuations entirely foreign to the Iliad and to its author. Agamemnon is a mere stage king; and it can be no wonder that Nestor's character, which requires a fine appreciation from its rounded construction, should have become thoroughly commonplace and vapid. The same lot befalls Ulysses, who is made to play quite a secondary part. Paris, without any mending of his moral qualities, is allowed to make a much more respectable figure: the Helen of Homer reproaches his cowardice; but here he says, 'I would fain have armed to-day, but my Nell would not have it so.' She appears as the mere adulteress ; and those who remember how she is treated in Homer will be able to measure the declension that time and unskilled hands had wrought, when they read the speech of Diomed describing her as follows: : 'She's bitter to her country: hear me, Paris! A Trojan hath been slain: since she could speak The palm of pure heroism is now become so entirely Hector's that Achilles only slays him by means of the swords of his myrmidons, not by his own proper might; and that, too, does not happen until, wearied and disarmed, he applies to Achilles to forego his vantage:‡ so that Ajax says with very great propriety indeed, 'Great Hector was as good a man as he.' § Shirley's 'Contention of Ajax and Ulysses,' independently of other merits, deserves notice for a partial return towards just con *Act iii. sc. 1. † Act iv. sc. 1. § Ibid. v. 10. ception Yet even here the claim of ception of the Homeric characters. I may compare him to some spacious building; Only the garret, his exalted head, Useless for wise receipt, is fill'd with lumber.' Dryden followed Shakspeare in the portion of this field which he had selected; and cast afresh the subject of Troilus and Cressida. He departed alike from Shakspeare and from Chaucer by making Cressida prove innocent, a supposition, says Scott, no more endurable in the preceding age than one " which should have exhibited Helen chaste, or Hector a coward.' All the incongruities of Shakspeare's play are here continued, including the mixture of the modern element of love with the Greek and Trojan chivalry; Ajax and Achilles are depressed to the same low level. Ajax and Achilles! two mudwalls of fool, says Thersites; and Ulysses answers in a similar strain. Troilus fairly slays Diomed in single combat, and is then himself slain by Achilles in the crowd. Hector is dispatched behind the scenes under the swords of a multitude of men.† A short time before this play of Dryden's, Racine had taken the characters of the Trojan war in hand. His 'Andromaque and Iphigénie' however afford us no new lights, and might very well have been conceived by a person who had never read a line of Homer, though in various passages there are imitations of the Homeric text. He was content in general to copy the traditions of Euripides; and it may provoke a smile to read an apology of his editor Boisjermain for the manner in which Ulysses is handled in the 'Iphigénie.' Appearing, near the outset of the piece, as a personage of very high importance, he notwithstanding plays in the plot a part wholly insignificant, instead of assuming, as he does in Euripides, the important function of urging the death of Iphigenia for the honour and benefit of Greece. Speaking of the critics who blame this arrangement, the editor says, they have failed to observe that Racine has * Dryden's Troil. and Cress., act ii. sc. 3. † Act v. sc. 2. adopted adopted the jealousy and intrigues of Hermione as the prime movers against Iphigenia, and that these produce the same result as might otherwise have been brought about by the reasonings of Ulysses. The work of literary profanation could hardly be carried further: it was not to be thus mauled at will that Homer constructed his masterpieces. In the 'Andromaque,' much as it is praised, we miss still more egregiously all the simplicity and grandeur of the Greek heroic age, and find ourselves environed by the infinite littleness of merely passionate personal intrigues, of which self is the pole and centre. Nothing can be more unsatisfactory than to see these archaic Grecian characters, dressed in the very last fashions of Paris, with speech and action accordingly. The total want of breadth and depth of character, and of earnestness and resolution, as opposed to mere violence, is such that at parts of the Andromaque' we are almost compelled to ask whether we are reading à burlesque? As, for instance, when we hear Andromache say to her confidante,— * Tu vois le pouvoir de mes yeux;' and Hermione threatening her pis aller lover Orestes with respect to Pyrrhus, S'il ne meurt aujourd'hui, je puis l'aimer demain.' + It is here too perhaps that we see carried to the very highest point of exaggeration the misstatement of the relative martial merits and performances, of Hector and the Greeks. Them Hermione, herself a Spartan, describes as 'Des peuples qui dix ans ont fui devant Hector; It was well that the handling of Homer should cease altogether when the characters and scenes belonging to his subject had become so thoroughly un-Homeric. An interval has followed, during which they have been allowed to repose. It would be hazardous to conjecture, after the failures of so many ages, whether they can ever be satisfactorily reproduced. But it was reserved for Goethe, with his vigorous grasp of classical antiquity, to tread a region bordering upon that of the Iliad and Odyssey with the consciousness of a master's power, and in his 'Iphigénie' to give to scenes, events, and characters of that region the tone, and colouring, with which alone they ought to be invested. And if the study and investigation of Homer shall hereafter be carried * Acte iii. sc. 5. Acte iv. sc. iii. Acte iii. sc. 3. on on with a zeal at all proportioned to the advantages we now enjoy for the purpose, they cannot fail to accumulate sound and useful materials for future genius to mould into such forms of true beauty and grandeur, as shall contribute to a large distribution of the inexhaustible Homeric treasure for the pleasure and profit of mankind. 3: William Euast Fiedlere. ART. VIII.-1. An Argument against immediately repealing the Laws which treat the Nuptial Bond as indissoluble. By the Rev. John Keble, M.A. London, 1857. 2. Considerations on Divorce a vinculo Matrimonii, in connexion with Holy Scripture. By a Barrister. London, 1857. 3. On Divorce. By Christopher Wordsworth, D.D., Canon of Westminster. London, 1857. 4. Sequel to the Argument, &c. By the Rev. John Keble, M.A. London, 1857. 5. Speech of Baron Von Gerlach in the Prussian Chamber, on the Marriage Law, with Preface by Henry Drummond, M.P. London, 1857. 6. A Bill intituled An Act to amend the Law relating to Divorce and Matrimonial Causes in England.' (Brought from the Lords, 25th June, 1857.) age THE in which we live claims, and in some respects deserves, the praise of being active, prudent, and practical: active in the endeavour to detect evils, prudent in being content with limited remedies, and practical in choosing them according to effectiveness rather than to ideology. But if an eulogist, contemplating the course of events from one point of view, may hold this language without fear of confutation, a censor may, from his opposite standing-ground, launch his rebukes with equal confidence and equal justice. He may urge that we are, at least in the sphere of public affairs, restless, violent, and feeble: restless, in our impatience of evils which belong to our human state, and in attempting the removal of which we can hope nothing better than to exchange them for others far more grievous; violent, in laying irreverent hands upon good laws and institutions on account of some imperfection which attaches to them, or it may be only to our use of them; lastly, and most of all, feeble in our partial and narrow modes of handling emergencies, our inability to solve problems with which other times and men have not feared to grapple-nay, our incapacity even to measure the scope of our own own arguments, or learn, at the very time when we are setting forth under their guidance, how far they are likely to lead us, and where they will permit or enable us to stop. In general it may be said that the censor and the eulogist of the age are not, when thus speaking each for himself, absolutely in conflict. They find respectively their subject-matter in different fields of legislation. Where the work to be done is mechanical and external, the eulogist may be justified. Where it touches the more inward and subtle forces which operate upon the relations of man, the censor is in the right. Appreciating complaints by their loudness, and remedies by the hardihood of the promises their projectors offer-choosing subjects according to the immediate profit or popularity they will yield, and not for real urgency -thinking more of the present than the past, and of the future less than either-we forswear the qualities and invert the habits of mind necessary for an occupation where men should dig deep for their foundations, and learn to be content with slow, and for a long time perhaps invisible, results. Thus it is, in such a temper and with such prospects, that we appear to be dealing with the greatest, oldest, and most universal of all social institutions, the great institution of marriage. An active agitation has for some twenty years been carried on against the Table of prohibited Degrees, or, in other words, the law of incest; for this it is that is really in question. In regard to this subject our law was settled with admirable wisdom at the Reformation upon the basis of the scriptural prohibitions; and until within the time we have named these just restraints appear to have been in harmony with the entire public opinion of the country; although, as is well known, there were cases, and there still are cases, some of them much worse than that of the wife's sister, where prohibited marriages are contracted de facto. Indeed, we must do our forefathers of the last century the justice to say, that their only legislation upon marriage was conceived in the intention not of impairing, but of restoring and heightening the fences which enclose the sacred precinct. We speak not of the enactments respecting Royal Marriages in the twelfth year of George III. (on which has been laid the blame rather due to the policy pursued under them), but of the general provisions of the Act 26 Geo. II. c. 33, which were directed to the prevention of marriages either clandestine, or between persons judged to be incompetent by age. At that period these evils must have attained, at least in the great towns, to an alarming height; for it is stated that at St. Ann's, the church of one of the most populous parishes in London, the marriages were but |