Goethe has disclosed his sources here; and his setting for the play seems just as inappropriate as his heroine and hero. The ancients were convinced that Corfu was Phæacia, and there is a certain austerity about Corfu that exactly suits the theme; whereas Taormina is all riotous luxuriance, befitting a Cyclops or a Satyr, but not Nausicaa. And surely Ulysses and Nausicaa are worlds away from Goethe and the ladies who adored him. Croce has called him ‘gran poeta’ and ‘borghese’ also, that is, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘middle-class’; and I think it hits him off. Tradition has made Homer old and blind, and knows nothing of his maturity or youth. And from this I gather that he made his reputation late in life; and I suspect he made it with his later work, the _Odyssey_, or rather with the striking part of it, the travels of Ulysses, v. 1-xiii. 184. I fancy that Ulysses was to Homer what Hajji Baba was to Morier--a character of whom he could narrate all manner of tales collected from all sources; and his tales of Southern Italy and Sicily were just the tales to take the fancy of the Greeks, when they first thought of planting colonies there. For my own part I believe that he lived on until about 800 B.C.--as Herodotos avers, ii. 53--and that he heard the first explorers’ tales of all the places that Ulysses visits. I do not underrate the difficulties of this, and have read some cubic feet of books about them; but, where the critics trace the handiwork of different poets, I cannot see anything but Homer at different stages of his life. He must have reached a good old age; and an author’s point of view may shift a long way with advancing years. In the Vatican Library they show you Henry the Eighth’s treatise against Martin Luther with the author’s dedication to the Pope. There is an amusing little volcano near Girgenti, and I once spent the best part of a day there playing with it, 26 March 1885. It is called the Maccaluba, which clearly is the Arabic _maklûbah_, ‘topsy-turvy,’ so that the name goes back to the days of Arab rule in Sicily. The mound is about 150 feet high, and on it there are little cones that shoot out gas and mud. You throw turf and stones into the mouth of a cone until you stop it up: then it wheezes and gurgles for a while, and finally shoots out the things you have put in; and you retire briskly, as the mud is scorching if it catches you. But the whole volcano was very quiet then, and seemed more bored than angry in the way it shot things out.