--the golden vials for unguents. Use and beauty are still undivided; all that men's hands are set to make has still a fascination alike for workmen [198] and spectators. For such dainty splendour Troy, indeed, is especially conspicuous. But then Homer's Trojans are essentially Greeks--Greeks of Asia; and Troy, though more advanced in all elements of civilisation, is no real contrast to the western shore of the Aegean. It is no barbaric world that we see, but the sort of world, we may think, that would have charmed also our comparatively jaded sensibilities, with just that quaint simplicity which we too enjoy in its productions; above all, in its wrought metal, which loses perhaps more than any other sort of work by becoming mechanical. The metal-work which Homer describes in such variety is all hammer-work, all the joinings being effected by pins or riveting. That is just the sort of metal-work which, in a certain naïveté and vigour, is still of all work the most expressive of actual contact with dexterous fingers; one seems to trace in it, on every particle of the partially resisting material, the touch and play of the shaping instruments, in highly trained hands, under the guidance of exquisitely disciplined senses--that cachet, or seal of nearness to the workman's hand, which is the special charm of all good metal-work, of early metal-work in particular. Such descriptions, however, it may be said, are mere poetical ornament, of no value in helping us to define the character of an age. But what is peculiar in these Homeric descriptions, [199] what distinguishes them from others at first sight similar, is a sort of internal evidence they present of a certain degree of reality, signs in them of an imagination stirred by surprise at the spectacle of real works of art. Such minute, delighted, loving description of details of ornament, such following out of the ways in which brass, gold, silver, or paler gold, go into the chariots and armour and women's dress, or cling to the walls--the enthusiasm of the manner-- is the warrant of a certain amount of truth in all that. The Greek poet describes these things with the same vividness and freshness, the same kind of fondness, with which other poets speak of flowers; speaking of them poetically, indeed, but with that higher sort of poetry which seems full of the lively impression of delightful things recently seen. Genuine poetry, it is true, is always naturally sympathetic with all beautiful sensible things and qualities. But with how many poets would not this constant intrusion of material ornament have produced a tawdry effect! The metal would all be tarnished and the edges blurred. And this is because it is not always that the products of even exquisite tectonics can excite or refine the aesthetic sense. Now it is probable that the objects of oriental art, the imitations of it at home, in which for Homer this actual world of art must have consisted, reached him in a quantity,