It is a prominent feature of the polytheistic system of the Greeks that the gods are represented as subject to all the passions and frailties of human nature. There were, indeed, among them personifications of good and of evil, as we see in A'te, the goddess of revenge or punishment, and in the Erin'nys (or Furies), who avenge violations of filial duty, punish perjury, and are the maintainers of order both in the moral and the natural world; yet while these moral ideas restrained and checked men, the gods seem to have been almost wholly free from such control. "The society of Olympus, therefore," says MAHAFFY, "is only an ideal Greek society in the lowest sense--the ideal of the school-boy who thinks all control irksome, and its absence the greatest good--the ideal of a voluptuous man, who has strong passions, and longs for the power to indulge them without unpleasant consequences. It appears, therefore, that the Homeric picture of Olympus is very valuable, as disclosing to us the poet's notion of a society freed from the restraints of religion; for the rhapsodists [Footnote: Rhapsodist, a term applied to the reciters of Greek verse.] were dealing a death-blow (perhaps unconsciously) to the received religious belief by these very pictures of sin and crime among the gods. Their idea is a sort of semi-monarchical aristocracy, where a number of persons have the power to help favorites, and thwart the general progress of affairs; where love of faction overpowers every other consideration, and justifies violence or deceit. [Footnote: "Social Life in Greece," by J. P. Mahaffy.] MR. GLADSTONE has given us, in the following extract, his views of what he calls the "intense humanity" of the Olympian system, drawn from what its great expounder has set forth in the Iliad and the Odyssey. "That system," he says, "exhibits a kind of royal or palace life of man, but on the one hand more splendid and powerful, on the other more intense and free. It is a wonderful and a gorgeous creation. It is eminently in accordance with the signification of the English epithet--rather a favorite, apparently, with our old writers--the epithet jovial, which is derived from the Latin name of its head. It is a life of all the pleasures of mind and body, of banquet and of revel, of music and of song; a life in which solemn grandeur alternates with jest and gibe; a life of childish willfulness and of fretfulness, combined with serious, manly, and imperial cares; for the Olympus of Homer has at least this one recommendation to esteem--that it is not peopled with the merely lazy and selfish gods of Epicurus, but its inhabitants busily deliberate on the government of man, and in their debates the cause of justice wins.