the Greek Islands still differ greatly in the style of their female beauty.23 Now, the time for seeing the young women of a Grecian city, all congregated under the happiest circumstances of display, was in their local festivals. Many were the fair Phidiacan24 forms which Homer had beheld moving like goddesses through the mazes of religious choral dances. But at the islands of Ios, of Chios, and of Crete, in particular, we are satisfied that he had a standing invitation. To this hour, the Cretan life delights us with the very echo of the Homeric delineations. Take four several cases:

I. - The old Homeric superstition, for instance, which connects horses by the closest sympathy, and even by prescience, with their masters that superstition which Virgil has borrowed from Homer in his beau tiful episode of Mezentius - still lingers unbroken in Crete. Horses foresee the fates of riders who are doomed, and express their prescience by weeping in a human fashion. With this view of the horse's capacity it is singular, that in Crete this animal by preference should be called to aloyov, the brute or irrational creature. But the word innos has, by some accident, been lost in the modern Greek. As an instance both of the disparaging name, and of the ennobling superstition, take the following stanza from a Cretan ballad of 1825:

• Ωντεν εκαβαλλικεύε,
Εκλαιε τ' αλογο του

Και τότεσα το εγνώρισε
Πως ειναι ὁ θάνατος του.

Upon which he mounted, and his horse wept: and then he saw clearly how this should bode his death.'

Under the same old Cretan faith, Homer, in Il. xvii.

437, says

Θερμα κατα βλεφάρων χαμάδις δεε μυρομενοιν
Ηνιόχοιο ποθη.

Tears, scalding tears, trickled to the ground down the eyelids of them, (the horses,) fretting through grief for the loss of their charioteer.'

II. Another almost decisive record of Homer's familiarity with Cretan life, lies in his notice of the agrimi, a peculiar wild goat, or ibex, found in no part of the Mediterranean world, whether island or mainland, except in Crete. And it is a case almost without a parallel in literature, that Homer should have sent down to all posterity, in sounding Greek, the most minute measurement of this animal's horns, which measurement corresponds with all those recently examined by English travellers, and in particular with three separate pairs of these horns brought to England about the year 1836, by Mr. Pashley, the learned Mediterranean traveller of Trinity College, Cambridge. Mr. Pashley has since published his travels, and from him we extract the following description of these shy but powerful animals, furnished by a Cretan mountaineer: 'The agrimia are so active, that they will leap up a perpendicular rock of ten to fourteen feet high. They spring from precipice to precipice; and bound along with such speed, that no dog would be able to keep up with them. even on better ground than that where they are found. The sportsman must never be to windward of them, or they will perceive his approach long before he comes within musket-shot.

They often carry off a ball; and, unless they fall immediately on being struck, are mostly lost to the sportsman, although they may have received a mortal wound. They are commonly found two, three, or four together; sometimes a herd of eight and even nine is seen. They are always larger than the common goat. In the winter time, they may be tracked by the sportsman in the snow. It is common for men to perish in

the chase of them.

They are of a reddish color, and

never black or parti-colored like the common goat. The number of prominences on each horn, indicates the years of the animal's age.'

Now Homer in Iliad iv. 105, on occasion of Pandarus drawing out his bow, notices it as an interesting fact, that this bow, so beautifully polished, was derived from [the horns of] a wild goat, aiyos ayoiov; and the epithet by which he describes this wild creature is žada

preternaturally agile. In his Homeric manner he adds a short digressional history of the fortunate shot from a secret ambush, by which Pandarus had himself killed the creature. From this it appears that, before the invention of gunpowder, men did not think of chasing the Cretan ibex ; and from the circumstantiality of the account, it is evident that some honor attached to the sportsman who had succeeded in such a capture. He closes with the measurement of the horns in this memorable line, (memorable as preserving such a fact for three thousand years)

• Του κερα εκ κεφαλης έκκαιδεκα δωρα πεφυκει.

The horns from this creature s head measured sixteen dora in length. Now what is a doron? In the Venetian Scholia, some annotator had hit the truth, but had inadvertently used a wrong word. This word,

an oversight, was viewed as such by Heyne, who cor rected it accordingly, before any scholar had seen the animal. The doron is now ascertained to be a Homeric expression for a palm, or sixth part of a Grecian foot; and thus the extent of the horns, in that specimen which Pandarus had shot, would be two feet eight inches. Now the casual specimens sent to Cambridge by Mr. Pashley, (not likely to be quite so select as that which formed a personal weapon for a man of rank,) were all two feet seven and a half inches on the outer margin, and two feet one and a half inches on the inner. And thus the accuracy of Homer's account, (which as Heyne observes, had been greatly doubted in past ages,) was not only remarkably confirmed, but confirmed in a way which at once identifies, beyond all question, the Homeric wild-goat (as avotos) with the present agrimi of Crete; viz. by the unrivalled size of the animal's horns, and by the unrivalled power of the animal's movements, which rendered it necessary to shoot it from an ambush, in days before the discovery of powder.

6

But this result becomes still more conclusive for our present purpose: viz. for identifying Homer himself as a Cretan by his habits of life, when we mention the scientific report from Mr. Rothman of Trinity College, Cambridge, on the classification and habitat of the animal : It is not the bouquetin,' (of the Alps,) to which, however, it bears considerable resemblance, but the real wild-goat, the capra agagrus (Pallas), the supposed origin of all our domestic varieties. The horns present the anterior trenchant edge characteristic of this species. The discovery of the agagrus in Crete, is perhaps a fact of some zoological interest;

as it is the first well-authenticated European locality of this animal.'

Here is about as rigorous a demonstration that the sporting adventure of Pandarus must have been a Cretan adventure as would be required by the Queen's Bench. Whilst the spirited delineation of the capture, in which every word is emphatic, and picturesquely true to the very life of 1841,* indicates pretty strongly that Homer had participated in such modes of sporting himself.

III. Another argument for the Cretan habitudes of Homer, is derived from his allusion to the Cretan tumblers the zußisntiges —the most whimsical, perhaps, in the world; and to this hour the practice continues unaltered as in the eldest days. The description is easily understood. Two men place themselves side by side; one stands upright in his natural posture; the other stands on his head. Of course this latter would be unable to keep his feet aloft, and in the place belonging to his head, were it not that his comrade throws his arms round his ankles, so as to sustain his legs inverted in the air. Thus placed, they begin to roll forward, head over heels, and heels over head every tumble inverts their positions: but always there is one man, after each roll, standing upright on his pins, and another whose lower extremities are presented to the clouds. And thus they go on for hours. The per

formance obviously requires two associates; or, if the number were increased, it must still be by pairs; and accordingly Homer describes his turnbles as in the dual number.

* 1841 — viz., the date of the first publication of this essay.