gods but rivers and stars to witness his oath; "he does not say what they are, but he feels that he himself is a mysterious existence, standing by the side of them, mysterious existences." Sometimes the simplicity of Homer's similes makes us smile; "but there is great kindness and veneration in the smile." There is a beautiful formula which he uses to describe death :

"He thumped down falling, and his arms jingled about him.' Now, trivial as this expression may at first appear, it does convey a deep insight and feeling of that phenomenon. The fall, as it were, of a sack of clay, and the jingle of armour, the last sound he was ever to make throughout time, who a minute or two before was alive and vigorous, and now falls a heavy dead mass. . . . But we must quit Homer. There is one thing, however, which I ought to mention about Ulysses, that he is the very model of the type Greek, a perfect image of the Greek genius; a shifty, nimble, active man, involved in difficulties, but every now and then bobbing up out of darkness and confusion, victorious and intact."

...

Passing by the early Greek philosophers, whose most valuable contribution to knowledge was in the province of geometry, Carlyle comes to Herodotus.

"His work is, properly speaking, an encyclopædia of the various nations, and it displays in a striking manner the innate spirit of harmony that was in the Greeks. It begins with Croesus, King of Lydia; upon some hint or other it suddenly goes off into a digression on the Persians, and then, apropos of something else, we have a disquisition on the Egyptians, and so on. At first we feel somewhat impatient of being thus carried away at the sweet will of the author; but we soon find it to be the result of an instinctive spirit of harmony, and we see all these various branches of the tale come pouring down at last in the invasion of Greece by the Persians. It is that spirit of order which has constituted him the prose poet of his country. . . . It is mainly through him that we become acquainted with Themistocles, that model of the type Greek in prose, as Ulysses was in song.

...

"Contemporary with Themistocles, and a little prior to Herodotus, Greek tragedy began. Eschylus I define to have been a

truly gigantic man-one of the largest characters ever known, and all whose movements are clumsy and huge like those of a son of Anak. In short, his character is just that of Prometheus himself as he has described him. I know no more pleasant thing than to study Eschylus; you fancy you hear the old dumb rocks speaking to you of all things they had been thinking of since the world began, in their wild, savage utterances."

Sophocles translated the drama into a choral peal of melody. "The 'Antigone' is the finest thing of the kind ever sketched by man." Euripides writes for effect's sake, "but how touching is the effect produced!"

Socrates, as viewed by Carlyle, is "the emblem of the decline of the Greeks," when literature was becoming speculative.

"I willingly admit that he was a man of deep feeling and morality; but I can well understand the idea which Aristophanes had of him, that he was a man going to destroy all Greece with his innovation. . . . He shows a lingering kind of awe and attachment for the old religion of his country, and often we cannot make out whether he believed in it or not. He must have had but a painful intellectual life, a painful kind of life altogether one would think. . . . He devoted himself to the teaching of morality and virtue, and he spent his life in that kind of mission. I cannot say that there was any evil in this; but it does seem to me to have been of a character entirely unprofitable. I have a great desire to admire Socrates, but I confess that his writings seem to be made up of a number of very wire-drawn notions about virtue; there is no conclusion in him; there is no word of life in Socrates. He was, however, personally a coherent and firm man.

We pass now (Lecture III.) to the Romans.

"We may say of this nation that as the Greeks may be compared to the children of antiquity from their naïveté and gracefulness, while their whole history is an aurora, the dawn of a higher culture and civilisation, so the Romans were the men of antiquity, and their history a glorious, warm, laborious day, less beautiful and graceful no doubt than the Greeks, but more essentially useful. The Greek life was shattered to pieces against the harder,

...

stronger life of the Romans.

It was just as a beautiful crystal jar becomes dashed to pieces upon the hard rocks, so inexpressible was the force of the strong Roman energy.”

The Romans show the characters of two distinct species of people-the Pelasgi and the Etruscans. The old Etruscans, besides possessing a certain genius for art, were an agricultural people

"endowed with a sort of sullen energy, and with a spirit of intensely industrious thrift, a kind of vigorous thrift. Thus with respect to the ploughing of the earth they declare it to be a kind of blasphemy against nature to leave a clod unbroken. . . . Now this feeling was the fundamental characteristic of the Roman people before they were distinguished as conquerors. Thrift is a quality held in no esteem, and is generally regarded as mean; it is certainly mean enough, and objectionable from its interfering with all manner of intercourse between man and man. But I can say

that thrift well understood includes in itself the best virtues that a man can have in the world; it teaches him self-denial, to postpone the present to the future, to calculate his means, and regulate his actions accordingly; thus understood, it includes all that man can do in his vocation. Even in its worst state it indicates a great people." +

Joined with this thrift there was in the Romans a great seriousness and devoutness; and they made the Pagan notion of fate much more productive of consequences than the Greeks did, by their conviction that Rome was fated to rule the world. And it was good for the world to be ruled sternly and strenuously by Rome; it is the true liberty to obey.

"That stubborn grinding down of the globe which their ancestors practised, ploughing the ground fifteen times to make it pro

Here Carlyle speaks of Niebuhr, whose book "is altogether a laborious thing, but he affords after all very little light on the early period of Roman history."

See, to the same effect, "a certain editor" in "Frederick the Great," b. iv., ch. 4.

duce a better crop than if it were ploughed fourteen times, the same was afterwards carried out by the Romans in all the concerns of their ordinary life, and by it they raised themselves above all other people. Method was their principle just as harmony was of the Greeks. The method of the Romans was a sort of harmony, but not that beautiful graceful thing which was the Greek harmony. Theirs was a harmony of plans, an architectural harmony, which was displayed in the arranging of practical antecedents and consequences."

The "crowning phenomenon" of their history was the struggle with Carthage. The Carthaginians were like the Jews, a stiff-necked people; a people proverbial for injustice.

"I most sincerely rejoice that they did not subdue the Romans, but that the Romans got the better of them. We have indications which show that they were a mean people compared to the Romans, who thought of nothing but commerce, would do anything for money, and were exceedingly cruel in their measures of aggrandisement and in all their measures. . . . How the Romans got on after that we can see by the Commentaries which Julius Cæsar has left us of his own proceedings; how he spent ten years of campaigns in Gaul, cautiously planning all his measures before he attempted to carry them into effect. It is, indeed, a most interesting book, and evinces the indomitable force of Roman energy; the triumph of civil, methodic man over wild and barbarous man.'

Before Cæsar the government of Rome seems to have been

"a very tumultuous kind of polity, a continual struggle between the Patricians and the Plebeians. . . . Therefore I cannot join in the lamentations made by some over the downfall of the Republic, when Cæsar took hold of it. It had been but a constant struggling scramble for prey, and it was well to end it, and to see the wisest, cleanest, and most judicious man of them place himself at the top of it. . . . And what an Empire was it! Teaching mankind that they should be tilling the ground, as they ought to be, instead of fighting one another. For that is the real thing which every man is called on to do-to till the ground, and not to slay his poor brother-man."

Coming now to their language and literature-the peculiarly distinguishing character of the language is "its imperative sound and structure, finely adapted to command." Their greatest work was written on the face of the planet in which we live; and all their great works were done spontaneously through a deep instinct.

"The point is not to be able to write a book; the point is to have the true mind for it. Everything in that case which a nation does will be equally significant of its mind. If any great man among the Romans, Julius Cæsar or Cato for example, had never done anything but till the ground, they would have acquired equal excellence in that way. They would have ploughed as they conquered. Everything a great man does carries the traces of a great man."

Virgil's "Eneid "

"ranks as an epic poem, and one, too, of the same sort in name as the Iliad' of Homer. But I think it entirely a different poem, and very inferior to Homer. There is that fatal consciousness, that knowledge that he is writing an epic. The plot, the style, all is vitiated by that one fault. The characters, too, are none of them to be compared to the healthy, whole-hearted, robust men of Homer, the much-enduring Ulysses, or Achilles, or Agamemnon. Æneas, the hero of the poem, is a lachrymose sort of man altogether. He is introduced in the middle of a storm, but instead of handling the tackle and doing what he can for the ship, he sits still, groaning over his misfortunes. Was ever mortal,' he asks, 'so unfortunate as I am? Chased from port to port by the persecuting deities, who give me no respite,' and so on; and then he tells them how he is the pious Eneas.' In short, he is just that sort of lachrymose man! there is hardly anything of a man in the inside of him.”

When he let himself alone," Virgil was a great poet, admirable in his description of natural scenery, and in his women; an amiable man of mild deportment, called by the people of Naples "the maid." "The effect of his poetry is like that of some laborious mosaic of many