laid himself open to satire. At Croxteth (Lord Sefton's) one of the young ladies said to Creevey

'We have seen a good deal of Mr Brougham lately. He went to the play with us three or four times, and you never saw such a figure as he was. He wears a black stock or collar, and it is so wide that you see a dirty coloured handkerchief under it, tied tight round his neck. You never saw such an object or anything half so dirty' (ii, 137).

Another anecdote about dress concerns a new style of greatcoat which came in about that time, called a Wellington. Lord Grey ordered one; but, when he appeared in it, his wife and daughter flew at him and tore it from his back, whether on account of its ugly shape or of its Tory name we are not informed. Lady Grey, it seems, was less tolerant of a bad coat than of a bad character. Creevey was sitting with her once, just after two ladies had left whose intrigues were notorious, when she said to Creevey, 'I like Lady So-and-so, and one or two others'-naming them-' they never say anything to offend me, and I do not feel that I have anything to do with all the different lovers they are said to have had.' For herself, she added, her own was a lucky case. Had she, like these ladies, married a man she did not respect, she might have acted like them (vol. ii, 302).

Creevey met Lord and Lady Grey at Stoke, where they had just arrived from Windsor Castle. Lady Grey said, in her own distressed manner, she was really more dead than alive. All the boring she had ever experienced in her life was nothing to those two nights. She hoped never to see a mahogany table again. The King and Queen, the Duchess of Gloucester, Princess Augusta, Madame de Lieven and herself, had sat round one for hours the Queen knitting, the King sleeping, or only waking up now and then to say, 'Exactly so, ma'am.' What a picture! Could not Dendy Sadler paint it? Meantime Lord Grey was amusing himself better at the expense of Sir Henry Halford, who would insist on showing him some of his own Latin verses. Grey said he thought the verses were good. But there,' he said, pointing to the Provost of Eton, who was one of the party, 'show them to him.' Sir Henry read them out, but before he got to the end Goodall pounced upon a false quantity, at which, to Grey's infinite delight, Sir Henry turned scarlet.'

No doubt Creevey's popularity arose in part from his being a good talker and able to help the conversation when it seemed likely to flag. At the Duchess of Leinster's, when the guests were rather silent, 'everything must be done by Mr Thomas.' At dinner at Lord Grey's, when even Sydney Smith was among the guests, Creevey flattered himself that he had taken the lead. When he

opened the door for the ladies after dinner, the Duchess of Cleveland remarked, 'How agreeable you have been!' and Lady Grey, who came last, put out her hand and said, 'Oh, thank you, Mr Creevey, how useful you have been!' Creevey evidently did something in return for his board and lodging.

We have little space for dealing with the new reign, and Creevey at the Court of Queen Victoria. Here he held his own. He dined with the Queen at the Pavilion at Brighton, and describes the dinner in his usual graphic style. He was highly gratified with his reception: 'the Queen,' he says, 'is very natural, has a beautiful voice, so that Lord Grey "cried with joy" when he heard it in the House of Lords'; and Creevey fully believed all that he heard of her great abilities, her strong character, her tact, and her good-humour. In the evening at the Pavilion he played two rubbers of whist, one against the Duchess of Kent, and one as her partner. Lord Grey told him of a report that the Queen was going to marry Lord Melbourne; but he makes no remark upon a rumour which we should have thought likely to set him off at a gallop. He was now getting an old man; but age had not quenched his vivacity, nor, seemingly, impaired his activity. December 28, 1837, when he was within three months of his seventieth birthday, he was present at the servants ball at Holkham, at Christmas, when he danced down twenty-five couples in a country-dance with the Dowager Lady Anson. The last letter in the series is dated only a month later, that is, on January 27. Early in February he died; and it seems curiously congenial with his origin, his character, and his fortune, that of the manner of his death, and of those who attended him in his last illness, nothing is known.'

T. E. KEBBEL.

On

Art. X.-LATEST LIGHTS ON THE HOMERIC QUESTION. 1. The Iliad. Edited, with apparatus criticus, prolegomena, notes and appendices, by Walter Leaf, Litt.D. Second edition. Two vols. London: Macmillan, 1900, 1902.

2. Homer's Odyssey: Books XIII-XXIV.

Edited, with

English notes and appendices, by D. B. Monro, M.A. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901.

THE two works which lie before us afford a striking testimony to the vitality of English scholarship. Nothing indeed could well be more different than the character and temper of the two editors; but fortunately these characteristics are suited, 'by some divine dispensation,' as Plato says, to their respective subjects. The audacity and acuteness of Dr Leaf are qualities which find full scope in the tangled and thorny paths of the Iliad'; the conservatism and caution of Mr Monro, carried, perhaps, sometimes to excess, are things to be thankful for when we look upon the question of the authorship of the 'Odyssey'; and both editors are alike well equipped in knowledge and unwearying industry. It is unfortunately only too natural, in a subject where all is uncertain, that they should not always agree; finality is not to be expected in the Homeric question; but the limits within which they differ are comparatively restricted, and their speculation is never flimsy.

It is often an interesting thing to look back upon the state of our knowledge in any subject fifty or a hundred years ago, to trace again the lines of the ancient camp in which the leaders of learning in those days thought themselves impregnle, to mark how the advance of science has altered the conditions of their warfare. Such a retrospect may well, at the same time, have a chastening effect, when we note how those old bulwarks have crumbled, and may lead us to entertain some doubt of the real strength of our own.

Since those happy days of primal innocence, when men were content to accept Homer as one and indivisible, without going beyond the glory of poetry which, after all, must ever remain the supremely important thing about him; when, if we may parody a line Tennyson,

'the time was Maytime, for as yet no Wolf had dreamed' -since those days there have been three names of firstrate importance in the field of Homeric criticism, Wolf, Grote, and Schliemann. Wolf threw all our notions about Homer, the poet, into chaos; into that chaos Grote, like a second Anaxagoras, imported reason; Schliemann revealed the world of which Homer sang, the foundation on which he built. Other scholars and explorers have advanced in the paths which they threw open, but no one else has illuminated the whole question by any similar flash of original genius.

To go back to Wolf is perhaps now superfluous and, even to the most general reader, something of a nuisance. For indeed Wolf was a destroying and unsettling agent of great power, but as a creator did little or nothing. 'Wolf's an atheist,' cried Mrs Browning; he would create a world by the fortuitous concourse of atoms; and the idea of an 'Iliad' or 'Odyssey' arising out of primitive short lays,' by some kind of external force driving them together, was an idea which could never conquer the world of Homeric scholars. His argument that a long poem was impossible under the conditions of that date when writing was unknown has been disproved by comparison with the early narrative literature of other races, such as the sagas of Iceland and the Kalevala of the Finns; and it can be disproved by the evidence of Homer himself in his account of Demodocus, to which we shall have occasion to return. And, that once gone, the whole Wolfian hypothesis remains in the air. In truth it is very difficult now to put oneself back into his position; perhaps it comes roughly to this, that he felt the 'Iliad' to be a mysterious composition, but could not grasp the principle of its growth; that he was strongly influenced by the revival of interest in popular and ballad poetry which Herder and others had awakened; and that between these two forces he was drawn into speculations which he himself could not approve in his soberer moments, but which he strove to justify by far-fetched arguments. However, it is certain that, from the moment his 'Prolegomena' were published, it remained no longer possible to acquiesce in the old comfortable views, or absence of views, about Homer and the Homeric poems.

The successors of Wolf in Germany followed him up

with misdirected energy. Lachmann dissected the 'Iliad into 'many a lay and many a thing,' as Chaucer has it, with a glorious disregard of the economy which nature unfortunately displays in the production of poets, and without any of those misgivings which haunted Wolf himself. The criticism applied by Grote to these proceedings is absolutely crushing. Common-sense was the great attribute of the English historian; and this was backed up by unwearying labour and a consummate grasp of the whole question in all its bearings. A single sentence of his pricks the bubble at once: 'Now the Wolfian theory explains the gaps and contradictions throughout the narrative, but it explains nothing else.' What then remained to be explained? Why, the fact that there was a narrative there at all, that some kind of a thread does after all run through the 'Iliad.' For, however much the alleged unity of plot in that poem may have been exaggerated by the orthodox believers in early days, including Aristotle himself, who found nothing to complain of except that the two epics were somewhat long, nevertheless some sort of a unity there is. But at the same time this unity is blurred in a manner not to be paralleled in any other epic; the story simply does not get on as anybody would expect; the stream seems to stagnate and swell out into great lakes. Of the 'Odyssey' one might say with truth, in the divine words of Coleridge: 'Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through hill and dale the sacred river ran':

but the Iliad' does not meander, it sticks. All that can be said in defence of it has been said by conservative critics, notably, in these latter days, by Mr Andrew Lang; but, as it has been said of Milton that the best answer to his dispraisers is to read him, so you may say of the 'Iliad' that the fatal objection to those defenders of its plot is that you cannot read it and believe in them. The real difficulty in the way of dissectors of the 'Iliad' is the splendour of the poetry; but that is another question.

To this difficulty, indeed, Grote appears to have been as blind as you might expect of the great emperor of common-sense. The lady in Cherbuliez's story informs a professor of chemistry that there are certain delicacies of sentiment which you cannot acquire by manipulating