gone--can, as if reviving all, render those Shadows, to us--now, here--the earliest objects of a wondering and aspiring enthusiasm:--the first enkindlers in our bosoms of that glowing, intense, comprehensive, and intelligent sympathy, which transports us out of the central self, and beyond the close-drawn horizon of our own particular life, to feel the conditions and to understand the spirits of all our fellow men? Let the theory be true, which denies to these incomparable works an individual author--which supposes them woven together of many songs, first sung in many places, by many singers; let the benignly august, fillet-bound head before us, be--that which only at last it can be--a conjecture of the Grecian chisel;--we see at least here how the consummated art of sculpture has chosen to express, in corporeal form, the one soul of power which animates those immortal twins of poesy. We see in what shape of a human head, crowned with its own irradiations, the fountains of all song might have sprang. We see what the living and wandering minstrel of Greece, beloved and honoured wheresoever, in hall or on green, he and his harp came,--what the individual Homer, for whose birth seven cities contended, and whom in the after-day the land numbered amongst her half-divine and worshipped heroes--WOULD HAVE BEEN:--or, WAS! [Although modern antiquaries agree with Pliny that busts of Homer are apocryphal, yet there can be no doubt this is the true Greek conventional portrait of that poet. A headless marble was dug up inscribed with his name and shortly afterwards the head itself was found in the same hole, and it fitted precisely to the marble previously discovered. The bust, so found, is now in the Naples Museum. The same head is constantly found in other representations of the ancient poet. The head is bound with the “strophium,” an ornament given by the Greek artists to their gods and heroes. The attitude of the head would seem to express the blindness with which Homer, according to tradition, was afflicted. This bust is from the marble in the Stanza dei Filosofi of the Capitoline Museum, Rome.] [28] The objects forming the Portrait Gallery in the Crystal Palace, are numbered in red figures throughout. 2. ARCHILOCHUS. _Greek Poet._ [Born at Paros, about B.C. 700. Killed in battle, about B.C. 635] A satirical poet of great renown, whose acrid pen spared neither friend nor foe. A writer also of licentious verse. Fragments only of his compositions have come down to us. To him is attributed the invention of the Iambic measure, and he shares with Thaletas and Terpander the honour of establishing lyric poetry in Greece. The victors in the Olympic games were accustomed to sing one of his hymns in their triumphal procession. The countenance of his statue denotes impudent boldness.