and with a novelty, just sufficient to warm and stimulate without [200] surfeiting the imagination; it is an exotic thing of which he sees just enough and not too much. The shield of Achilles, the house of Alcinous, are like dreams indeed, but this sort of dreaming winds continuously through the entire Iliad and Odyssey--a child's dream after a day of real, fresh impressions from things themselves, in which all those floating impressions re-set themselves. He is as pleased in touching and looking at those objects as his own heroes; their gleaming aspect brightens all he says, and has taken hold, one might think, of his language, his very vocabulary becoming chryselephantine. Homer's artistic descriptions, though enlarged by fancy, are not wholly imaginary, and the extant remains of monuments of the earliest historical age are like lingering relics of that dream in a tamer but real world. The art of the heroic age, then, as represented in Homer, connects itself, on the one side, with those fabulous jewels so prominent in mythological story, and entwined sometimes so oddly in its representation of human fortunes--the necklace of Eriphyle, the necklace of Helen, which Menelaus, it was said, offered at Delphi to Athene Pronoea, on the eve of his expedition against Troy--mythical objects, indeed, but which yet bear witness even thus early to the aesthetic susceptibility of the Greek temper. But, on the other hand, the art of the heroic age connects itself also with the actual early beginnings [201] of artistic production. There are touches of reality, for instance, in Homer's incidental notices of its instruments and processes; especially as regards the working of metal. He goes already to the potter's wheel for familiar, life-like illustration. In describing artistic wood-work he distinguishes various stages of work; we see clearly the instruments for turning and boring, such as the old-fashioned drill-borer, whirled round with a string; he mentions the names of two artists, the one of an actual workman, the other of a craft turned into a proper name--stray relics, accidentally preserved, of a world, as we may believe, of such wide and varied activity. The forge of Hephaestus is a true forge; the magic tripods on which he is at work are really put together by conceivable processes, known in early times. Compositions in relief similar to those which he describes were actually made out of thin metal plates cut into a convenient shape, and then beaten into the designed form by the hammer over a wooden model. These reliefs were then fastened to a differently coloured metal background or base, with nails or rivets, for there is no soldering of metals as yet. To this process the ancients gave the name of empaestik,+ such embossing being still, in our own time, a beautiful form of metal-work.