“Read a Grecian tale retold Which, cast in later Grecian mould, Quintus Calaber Somewhat lazily handled of old.” Quintus Calaber, more usually called Quintus Smyrnæus, is a writer of perhaps the fourth century of our era. About him nothing, or next to nothing, is known. He told, in so late an age, the conclusion of the Tale of Troy, and (in the writer’s opinion) has been unduly neglected and disdained. His manner, I venture to think, is more Homeric than that of the more famous and doubtless greater Alexandrian poet of the Argonautic cycle, Apollonius Rhodius, his senior by five centuries. His materials were probably the ancient and lost poems of the Epic Cycle, and the story of the death of Œnone may be from the _Little Iliad_ of Lesches. Possibly parts of his work may be textually derived from the Cyclics, but the topic is very obscure. In Quintus, Paris, after encountering evil omens on his way, makes a long speech, imploring the pardon of the deserted Œnone. She replies, not with the Tennysonian brevity; she sends him back to the helpless arms of her rival, Helen. Paris dies on the hills; never did Helen see him returning. The wood-nymphs bewail Paris, and a herdsman brings the bitter news to Helen, who chants her lament. But remorse falls on Œnone. She does not go “Slowly down By the long torrent’s ever-deepened roar,” but rushes “swift as the wind to seek and spring upon the pyre of her lord.” Fate and Aphrodite drive her headlong, and in heaven Selene, remembering Endymion, bewails the lot of her sister in sorrow. Œnone reaches the funeral flame, and without a word or a cry leaps into her husband’s arms, the wild Nymphs wondering. The lovers are mingled in one heap of ashes, and these are bestowed in one vessel of gold and buried in a howe. This is the story which the poet rehandled in his old age, completing the work of his happy youth when he walked with Hallam in the Pyrenean hills, that were to him as Ida. The romance of Œnone and her death condone, as even Homer was apt to condone, the sins of beautiful Paris, whom the nymphs lament, despite the evil that he has wrought. The silence of the veiled Œnone, as she springs into her lover’s last embrace, is perhaps more affecting and more natural than Tennyson’s “She lifted up a voice Of shrill command, ‘Who burns upon the pyre?’” The _St Telemachus_ has the old splendour and vigour of verse, and, though written so late in life, is worthy of the poet’s prime:—