of violence and turbulence, but also less of truth, of honour, above all of personal self-mastery and self-command. The Greeks never would have produced the Paris of the Iliad; for on behalf of no such dastard would they have been induced to bleed. But if they had engendered such a creature, they would not have paid the penalty: for man in the Trojan type would not have had the energy to recover it from the warrior-statesmen of the Achæan race, and under no circumstances could the really extravagant sentiment put by Virgil into the mouth of Diomed[524] have been fulfilled: [524] Æn. xi. 286. ultro Inachias venisset ad urbes Dardanus, et versis lugeret Græcia fatis. III. THALASSA. THE OUTER GEOGRAPHY OF THE ODYSSEY. The legendary Geography of the Odyssey may in one sense be compared with that of Ariosto, and that of Bojardo. I should be the first, indeed, to admit that a disquisition, having for its object to establish the delimitation of the Geography of either of those poets, and to fix its relation to the actual surface of the earth, was but labour thrown away. For two thousand years, however, perhaps for more, the Geography of the Odyssey has been a subject of interest and of controversy. In entering upon that field I ask myself, why the case of Homer is in this respect so different from that of the great Italian romancers? It is not only that, great as they were, we are dealing with one before whom their greatness dwindles into comparative littleness. Nor is it only, though it seems to be in part, because the adventures of Ulysses are, or appear to be, much more strictly bound up with place, than those of Orlando, Rinaldo, or Ruggiero. The difference, I think, mainly lies in this, that an intense earnestness accompanies Homer every where, even through his wild and noble romance. Cooped up as he was within a narrow and local circle--for such it was, though it was for so many centuries the centre of the whole greatness of the world--here is his effort to pass the horizon ‘by strength of thought;’ to pierce the mist; to shape the dim, confused, and conflicting reports he could pick up, according to the best of his knowledge and belief, into land and sea; to people its habitable spots with the scanty material he could command, every where enlarged, made good, and adorned out of the wealth of his vigorous imagination; and to form, by effort of the brain, for the first time as far as we know in the history of our race, an idea of a certain configuration for the surface of the Earth.