The moral signs of the Greek character, though not identical with those of the Phœnician, yet establish a resemblance between them; in so far that both possessed vigour, hardihood, and daring, and that the intelligence, which directed and sustained these great qualities, was susceptible of alliance with craft. In the censure upon the πρηκτῆρες, which Homer has conveyed through the mouth of Euryalus, we may read a genuine effusion of his own nature: but the gifts of Mercury to Autolycus appear to show, that the Phœnician character easily amalgamated with the Greek by its cunning, as well as by its strength. And certainly we may well marvel at the tenacity of tissue, with which these characters were formed, when we find that still, after the lapse of three thousand years, one race is distinguished beyond all others for aptitude and energy in prosecuting the pursuits of honourable commerce; that in England, now the centre of the trade of the whole world, the Greeks of the present day alike excel all other foreigners who frequent her great emporia, and the children of her own energetic and persevering people; themselves perhaps the offspring of the Thesprotians, who went for corn to Dulichium; of the Taphians, who carried swarthy iron to Temese; of the Cretans, who made much money in Egypt; and of the Lemnians, who obtained metals, hides, captives, and even oxen, in return for their wine, from the jovial Greeks of the army before Troy. The more we attempt an examination of the geography of the Odyssey, the more we find that, impossible as it is to reconcile with the actual distribution of earth and sea, it has marks of being derived from the nation, who navigated in the remote waters where its scenes are laid. The fundamental article of the whole is the circumscription of the known seas by the great river Ocean, which, alike in the Iliad and the Odyssey, flows round and round the earth, returning upon itself, ἀψόρροος[450], like what is called an endless rope. And the two keys, as I believe, to the comprehension of it are to be found in the double hypothesis, (1) That Homer placed to the northward of Thrace, Epirus, and the Italian peninsula, an expanse, not of land, but of sea, communicating with the Euxine. Or, to express myself in other words, that he greatly extended the Euxine westwards, perhaps also shortening it towards the east; and that he made it communicate, by the Gulfs of Genoa and Venice, with the southern Mediterranean. (2) That he compounded into one two sets of Phœnician traditions respecting the Ocean-mouth, and fixed the site of them in the North East.