adds a third picturesque epithet, Καμπύλα κύκλα χάλκεα ỏктáκηuа, 'round, brazen, eight-spoked wheels.' Also a fourth: ἀσπίδα πάντοσ ̓ ἴσην, καλὴν, χαλείην ἐξήλατον, an uniformly smooth, beautiful, brazen, hammered shield.' Who blames him for it? Who would not rather thank him for this little excess when we find what a good effect it can produce in a few suitable passages?

I do not mean, however, to deduce a strict justification of the poet or the painter from the abovementioned comparison of two friendly neighbours. A mere comparison proves and justifies nothing. But this observation must justify them. In the case of the painter, the two different moments are in such near and immediate contact, that without any violent effort they might be considered as one. In the case of the poet the multiplied traits which describe the different parts and properties in space follow so quick upon one another, so very closely, that we seem to hear them all at once.

And herein I say Homer derives very uncommon aid from the excellence of his language. It not only allows him all possible freedom in the accumulation and composition of epithets, but it also allows these accumulated epithets to be placed in so happy an order that there is no disagreeable uncertainty as to the objects to which they relate. Modern languages, generally, are entirely devoid of one or more of these advantages. Such, for instance, is the French language, which, by way of illustration, is obliged to make use of a circumlocution to express Καμπύλα, κύκλα, χάλκεα ὀκτάκιημα, as the round wheels which are of

brass, and have eight spokes,' expressing the meaning but destroying the picture. But here the sense is nothing, the picture everything; and the former without the latter makes the most animated poet a dreary proser, a fate which the good Homer has often undergone under the pen of the learned Madame Dacier. Our German language, on the contrary, can indeed change the Homeric adjectives, for the most part, into equivalent and equally short adjectives, but it cannot imitate the happy collocation and order in which the Greek places them. We say, indeed, 'the round, brazen, eight-spoked '-but 'the wheels' drag slowly behind. Who does not see that the three different predicates only convey a weak confused picture before we know the subject to which they belong? The Greek binds the subject immediately with the first predicate, and allows the others to follow. He says: 'round wheels, brazen, eight-spoked.' Thus we know at once of what the poet is speaking, and are made acquainted, according to the natural order of thought, first with the thing itself, then with its accidents. Our language has not this advantage, or shall I say that it has it, and can seldom make use of it without ambiguity? It is the same thing. For if we place the adjectives after the substantives they must stand in statu absoluto; we must say 'round wheels, brazen and eight-spoked.' But in this status our adjectives are used adverbially, and if they are united as such to the nearest verb which is predicated of the subject, produce not seldom an entirely false, but always a very ambiguous sense.

But I am delayed by trifles, and seem to have forgotten the shield of Achilles, that famous picture, in consequence of which more especially Homer has from all antiquity been considered as a teacher of painting h. A shield, it will be said, is surely an individual corporeal object, the detailed description of the successive parts of which cannot be allowed to belong to the province of the poet. And yet Homer has described this shield in more than a hundred admirable verses, as to its material, its form, and all the figures which fill up its enormous surface, so circumstantially and so accurately that modern artists have found no difficulty in making a picture exactly resembling it in all its parts.

I answer to this particular objection what I have already answered. Homer does not paint the shield as perfect and already made, but as a shield being made. He has availed himself of the much-praised artifice of changing that which is co-existent in his design into that which is successive, and thereby presenting us with the living picture of an action instead of the wearisome description of a body. We do not see the shield, but the divine master as he works. There he is with hammer and tongs before his anvil, and after he has wrought the plates out of the roughest ore, the figures which are destined for its ornament rise up before our eyes, one after the other, as he fashions them out of the ore. We do not lose sight of them till all are finished. Now they are finished,

and we stand amazed over the work, but it is with the believing amazement of an eye-witness who has seen the work wrought.