_Odyssey_, xvii. 290-327 (Author’s translation). Surely—even thus inadequately rendered—the most poignantly pathetic narrative of dog-life in literature! The hero, returning after a generation of absence, in a disguise impenetrable to son, servants, nay to the wife of his bosom, is recognised by one solitary living creature, a dog. And to this faithful animal, unforgetting in his forlorn decrepitude, whose affectionate gestures form his only welcome to the home now occupied by unscrupulous foes, ready to take his life at the first hint of his identity, he is obliged to refuse a stroke of his hand, or so much as a glance of his eye, to soothe the fatal spasm of his joy. A case that might well draw a tear, even from the much-enduring son of Laertes. It has not escaped the acumen of Sir William Geddes[79] that the compliment of an individual name is, in the Iliad, paid exclusively amongst the brute creation to horses; in the Odyssey (setting aside the mythical coursers of the Dawn, Book xxiii. 246) to a single dog. Now this may at first sight seem to be a trifling point; but a very little consideration will suffice to show its significance. To the author of the Odyssey, at least, the imposition, or even the disclosure of a name, was a matter clothed with a certain solemn importance. He lets us know how and why his hero came to be called ‘Odysseus,’ and furnishes us, to the best of his ability, with an etymological interpretation of that ill-omened title.[80] How distinctively human a thing it is to have a name we are made to feel when Alcinous conjures his mysterious guest to reveal the designation by which he is known to his parents, fellow-citizens, and countrymen, ‘since no man, good or bad, is anonymous’![81] And the reply is couched in an earnest and exalted strain, conveying at once the extent of the trust reposed, and the momentousness of the revelation granted— Footnote 79: _Problem of the Homeric Poems_, p. 218. Footnote 80: _Odyssey_, xix. 409. Footnote 81: _Ib._ viii. 552. Ulysses, from Laertes sprung, am I, Vers’d in the wiles of men, and fam’d afar.[82] Footnote 82: _Ib._ ix. 19, 20. The same scene, thrown into a grotesque form, is repeated in the cave of Polyphemus, where the upshot of the adventure depends wholly upon the prudence of the storm-tossed chieftain in responding to the monster’s vinous enthusiasm with the mock disclosure of a _no-name_. These illustrations help to make it plain that, in assigning to brutes individual appellations, we bestow upon them something essentially human, which they have not, and cannot have of themselves, but which marks their share in human interests, and their claim on human sympathy. So accurately is this true, that a table showing the relative frequency of individual nomenclature for different animals in various countries would assuredly, on the strength of that fact alone, set forth their relative position in the estimation of man.