of the Achilleid as the theology of Pindar and Eschylus stands above the theology of the Odyssey, and, as we may suppose, the theology of Socrates stood above the theology of Pindar. Now, it appears to me there is no proof of any such stage of development. The Jove of the Iliad is as much a moral god and a god of moral retribution as the god of the Odyssey; he punishes in the course of the poem the insolence of Agamemnon just as manifestly as in the Odyssey the insolence of the suitors of Penelope; and, if there be in the Achilleid a more frequent use of epithets referring to the omnipotence of Jove as the wielder of the physical forces of the Universe, and a more pronounced evidence of strife between the Olympian powers, it is simply because in these books the element of strife involves both gods and men, and the stormy nature of the subject has an effect on the associations of the poet. Other slight differences noticed under the head of religion by the Professor are either accidental, or proceed naturally from the different ballad materials which the poet used in the composition of different parts of his poem.

18. Professor Geddes discovers in his Achilleid a paleozoic period of morality, as well as of theology. But if it be a fact, as he says, and I make no doubt of the minute accuracy of his assertion, that the savage ferocity and brutal inhumanity of the Homeric heroes appear largely in the Achilleid, and less, or not at all, in his Odyssean books, he must not be allowed to forget that the books of the Achilleid are precisely those where the battle is at its hottest, and where ferocity, as a matter of course, plays a prominent part. It must be borne in mind likewise that the very essence of the poetic nature is sympathy, and that a minstrel, like a deer-hound, may be as mild as a lamb in one part of his poem, and fierce as a tiger in another. The books which Mr. Grote cuts out from the Iliad are all, except Book IX., precisely those where Achilles does not appear, and where of course the contagion of his fierce and iracund atmosphere does not affect the more placid tenour of the minstrel's emotion.

19. Under the heads of manners and customs Professor Geddes concludes (1.) That the Odyssean cantos of the Iliad are on a higher stage of architectural advancement than the cantos of the Iliad. So far as there may be any ground for this observation, the difference is explained simply by the fact that in the non-Achilleid books, which are not in the heat and turmoil of battle, domestic architecture is more naturally spoken of than in the more characteristically warlike books. (2.) A similar remark applies to words and epithets relating to dress and furniture. If these are more abundant in the non-Achilleid books of the Iliad, it is simply because the singer, not so engrossed and absorbed by the whirl and fire of battle, has leisure to think of other things, which bring him into the more peaceful region of the Odyssey. He could not avoid being Odyssean to a certain extent in his phraseology the moment he ceased to be exclusively and fervidly Achillean in his spirit.

(3.) The fact that ivory is mentioned often in the Odyssey, and only twice in the Iliad, and that in the non-Achillean books, may be taken to prove that the Thessalian minstrel who furnished the author of the Iliad with his material for the Achilleid, knew nothing of that article of Oriental commerce, while the ballad makers of Southern Greece, in the south-west of Asia Minor, who were in contact with the Phoenician traders in the Mediterranean, naturally did. (4.) Among other matters of less note under this head, Professor Geddes notes that, while the old semibarbarous method of buying a wife from her father with so much purchase money is dominant in the Iliad, in the Odyssey and the Ulyssean books of the Iliad the more civilized practice of giving a dowry with a wife seems to come to the foreground. But the instances in this case are too few on which to found any logical induction; and a slight difference of customs in such a matter might have existed at the same period in different parts of Greece, and so form no legitimate ground for any theory of paleozoic and neozoic formations in the practice of marriage. (5.) Certain modes of thought and expression in the Achilleid, to which Professor Geddes applies the epithet of archaic or palæozoic, appear to me to be only more bold and vivid, and indicate, as in the other cases, only that the fervid passion of the Achillean portion of the poems has impressed its fierce glow on certain portions of the phraseology of those works.

In

20. The attempt to prove a higher estimate of horses in the Achilleid as a proof of diverse authorship seems to me a complete failure. connexion with a Thessalian hero, and in the hurry and skurry of a hot battle-field, in which chariot-fighters play the principal part, the praise of horses naturally becomes more prominent; but all over Greece, as Aristotle remarks in the "Politics," in early times the horsemen were the aristocracy; and their less frequent praise in the Odyssey, and in the quiet books of the Iliad, belongs to the subject, not to the author.

21. I have the same feeling with regard to the dog. The Iliad is a warlike poem, and the principal part which dogs play in war is the part which they play in common with the vultures; and the mention of them with less fierce associations, in one or two places of the socalled Odyssean books, seems purely accidental.

22. In his chapter entitled "Local mint-marks," Professor Geddes, after a minute examination of topographical peculiarities, concludes that "it is in the Achilleid that the traces of Thessalian influence appear in the greatest copiousness and freshness; and the general strain of evidence is in favour of its Thessalian origin" (p. 266). To this proposition I can have no objection; in fact, I should have been surprised if it had been otherwise. That the popular ballads which celebrate the praise of a Thessalian hero should smell of Thessaly was quite natural, even if Northern Greece had not been what we know it was, the early nurse both of Hellenic poetry and theology; and a Smyrnean minstrel who sang the birth of Achilles would of course

use these local mint-marks preferably in those books where his materials came from this local source.

23. To the local mint-marks of his Ulyssean books, all to the effect that the author of these books was, as general tradition certified, an Asiatic Greek, belonging to the Eastern coast of the Ægean, no man can have any interest to object, except, perhaps, Mr. Gladstone, who to his other ingenious novelties has lately added this one, that the Homer of old Hellenic minstrelsy was a European, and not an Asiatic. But the topographical indications in these books prove only that wherever the author of the Iliad was not led to identify himself with the atmosphere and environment of the Thessalian ballads which centred round the person of Achilles, there he delighted in the scenery of the place of his birth; and the non-Achillean elements of his scenery smell of the Cayster and of Mount Ida, just as Walter Scott's earliest lays smell of Tweed-side and of the Eildon hills.

24. Under the next head (ch. 22) entitled "Glimpses of a Personal Homer," there is nothing that in the least degree alters the general bearing of the argument as above stated. The tradition that Homer was an Ionic Greek will explain the genesis and the contents of both the Iliad and Odyssey, as naturally as the scenery and subjects of Walter Scott's three first poems are explained by his being a native of Tweed-side, and his early residence in the Highlands. Sea voyages and sea adventures could not but be familiar to a bard who lived on the seaboard of a country rich in harbours, and familiarly visited by Phoenician merchant vessels; the plain of the Troad resounded with the echo of the great Thessalian captain's fervid chariot-wheels; and the ground not occupied by Thessalian traditions was naturally filled up by rich gleanings from the waving cornfields of South Hellenic minstrelsy.

25. In his twenty-third chapter, entitled "Symmetry of Ethical Purpose," Professor Geddes hazards the strong assertion that there is no moral purpose in the Achilleid, and that the original poem was first moralized by the addition of the non-Achillean books composed by a bard in a higher stage of ethical development, and whose great poem, the Odyssey, is not only, as Bunsen has it, the earliest and the best novel in the world, but, at the same time, the most solemn and serious sermon. The answer to this is supplied both by the invocation and by the whole course of the poem. The Bouλn Aids, or Counsel of βουλη Διός, Jove, which rules the whole course of the war, was to the effect that the insolence of an absolute king, doing violence to the feelings and the rights of a high-minded associate chief, was an act at once impolitic and sinful, and which could not fail to bring forth bitter fruit in the misfortunes and humiliation which overwhelmed the subjects of the insolent monarch, so long as he remained unreconciled to his doughty Thessalian ally.

26. In conclusion, I have two remarks to make:

(1) If Professor Geddes could bring an array of strictly philological

peculiarities to differentiate his Achillean and Ulyssean parts of the Iliad; that is, if he could prove a marked identity of linguistic idiom between the exsected books of the Iliad and the Odyssey, this in my opinion would bring an accession of real strength to his position which at present fails. But this is the very thing which I fear, even with the most curious aid, which he may borrow from Curtius and the other Sanscrit root-diggers, now everywhere enlarging their phylacteries with no small observation-this, I say, he will find it somewhat difficult to do. For, in the first place, supposing Homer to be the author of the whole poem, as he was born and moved about in a district where a considerable admixture of Aeolic, Doric, and Ionic peculiarities was current, nothing was more natural than that, in his capacity of wandering minstrel, he might use a predominance of Aeolic or Doric in one part of his poem and of Ionic in another. And, again; as the books in their separate shape had a wide currency through all Hellenic countries for several hundred years before they took their last shape under Pisistratus, it may readily have happened that, under local influence, some minstrels may have modified a certain sequence of the poems according to one dialectic variety, and other minstrels according to another variety.

(2) My second remark is that the relegation of certain books into the non-Achillean section, as being not necessary to the logical consistency of the poem, is a very arbitrary affair, and renders the basis of Professor Geddes' induction extremely insecure. For, not to mention that logical consistency is the virtue of an argument, not of a poem, in which digressions, and episodes, and expansions may often form the best part of the banquet, judging by their fervour, and spirit, and movement, and stirring power, I see no books of the Iliad that more potently breathe the spirit of the Achilleid than the fifth and the ninth, and yet these are to be denied to the author of those books whose inspiration is most akin to them, and to be handed over to the peaceful serenity and easygoing pace of the author of the Odyssey. This appears to me very much like taking the third canto of "Childe Harold" and handing it over to Samuel Rogers, or crediting to a composition marked by the finished antithetic grace of a French Béranger, a song that rings in its every line with the pathetic simplicity, the vivid naturalness, and the direct manly muscularity of Robert Burns.

JOHN S. BLACKIE.

VOL. XXXVIII.

U

RENT.

A REPLY TO MR. MURROUGH O'BRIEN.

I

N the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW for December, 1879, an endeavour was made to answer the question, What is Rent? The view then taken of the nature of rent has been criticised, in a friendly spirit, by Mr. Murrough O'Brien, in a paper read on April 20, 1880, to the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland. The matters of which this paper treats highly merit discussion. They have a direct bearing on a right understanding of the true nature of rent, of its essential character and effects, and this is a subject which possesses great importance at all times, and more especially at the present hour, when rent is angrily assailed by many sufferers as a cause and an aggravation of the agricultural depression with which they have been overtaken. Rent necessarily affects the whole country; it is debated on every side. Payers and receivers of rent are deeply interested in ascertaining what are the principles which determine its magnitude. What rent is? How large or how small it ought to be? are inquiries which concern the whole nation. Above all, the process by which the assessment of rent is reached is a matter of most critical importance: yet how many have mastered and got firm hold of it ? For most men, What is rent? is a question still most difficult to answer.

It will be easier to examine and judge the criticisms of Mr. Murrough O'Brien, if the view taken of the nature of rent in the CONTEMPORARY Review be first explained in its main features. The question, What is rent? naturally suggests the answer that rent is the consideration paid for the hire of land. Many stop at this answer, and fancy that they have given a full explaration of rent; but they are mistaken. It gives but little information about rent It is nothing more than a beading or title of a ebapter: the knowledge sought must follow. In the language both of law and of the common world rent expresses the