The readers of Dante will recollect with what complex precision, as a poetical Architect, he has actually, for the purposes of his work, built an Universe of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Every line of his poem has a determinate relation to a certain point in space, fixed in his own mind; but whether every such point be fixed or not in nature is no more material, than if it were simply one to be determined by axes of coordinates. Intricate as the fabric is, this great brother of Homer in his art never for a moment lets drop the thread of his labyrinth, but holds it steadily from the beginning of the first canto to the end of the hundredth. Homer, composing for a younger world, had to deal with all ideas whatsoever in simpler forms; but, I think, it is discernible that in his way he, too, made a systematic distribution of the Outer Earth, as he had rather vaguely conceived it in his teeming imagination. We are apt to forget, from the comparatively summary manner in which the subject is dismissed by the Poet, that the voyages and travels of Menelaus occupy a time almost as long as those of Ulysses. He has but recently returned, says Nestor to Telemachus, in the last year of his father’s wanderings[628]: and Menelaus himself states, that he came home only in the eighth year after the capture of Troy[629]. And as in point of time, so likewise they are geographically in correspondence. To Menelaus Homer has given, in outline, the southern world from east to west, and to Ulysses, in detail, the northern world from west to east. It is true that he made Ulysses begin his Wanderings, properly so called, with the Lotophagi in Africa: but this is because it was necessary to throw him at Malea, by some wide and irrecoverable deviation, off his route to Ithaca. So Menelaus loses his course at the very same critical point, the Malean Promontory[630]. Then the two strike off to the opposite ends of the diameter: Menelaus to Crete, for Cyprus, Phœnicia, and Egypt, in the south-east; Ulysses to Africa, for the Cyclopes, Æolia, and Læstrygonia, in the north-west. Again, Menelaus visits Libya to the westward, where, it will be remembered, he is to find his home after death in the Elysian fields. The counterpart of this is in the eastward movement of Ulysses along a northern zone to the isle of Circe, and in his visit to the Shades. Again, it is Phœnicia, which in the south-east forms a kind of boundary line between the known and the unknown world. Accordingly Homer has given us an idealized Phœnicia on the north-western line. Perhaps only partial, but still perfectly real, resemblances of character establish a poetical relation between the Φοίνικες and the Φαίηκες. Other parts of the Phæacian character might seem to have been borrowed from the Egyptians. No one, I think, can doubt that Homer had the Phœnicians to some extent in his mind, when he invented the Phæacians. But he has given us another etymological sign of the connection. The Φοίνικες