am afraid you will hardly accept this; I do not see how you can be expected to do so, for in the first place there is no even tolerable prose translation, and in the second, the Odyssey, like the Iliad, has been a school book for over two thousand five hundred years, and what more cruel revenge than this can dulness take on genius? The Iliad and Odyssey have been used as text-books for education during at least two thousand five hundred years, and yet it is only during the last forty or fifty that people have begun to see that they are by different authors. There was, indeed, so I learn from Colonel Mure's valuable work, a band of scholars some few hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, who refused to see the Iliad and Odyssey as by the same author, but they were snubbed and snuffed out, and for more than two thousand years were considered to have been finally refuted. Can there be any more scathing satire upon the value of literary criticism? It would seem as though Minerva had shed the same thick darkness over both the poems as she shed over Ulysses, so that they might go in and out among the dons of Oxford and Cambridge from generation to generation, and none should see them. If I am right, as I believe I am, in holding the Odyssey to have been written by a young woman, was ever sleeping beauty more effectually concealed behind a more impenetrable hedge of dulness and she will have to sleep a good many years yet before any one wakes her effectually. But what else can one expect from people, not one of whom has been at the very slight exertion of noting a few of the writer's main topographical indications, and then looking for them in an Admiralty chart or two? Can any step be more obvious and easy-indeed, it is so simple that I am ashamed of myself for not having taken it forty years ago. Students of the Odyssey for the most part are so engrossed with the force of the zeugma, and of the enclitic particle ye; they take so

much more interest in the digamma and in the Æolic dialect, than they do in the living spirit that sits behind all these things and alone gives them their importance, that, naturally enough, not caring about the personality, it remains and always must remain invisible to them.

If I have helped to make it any less invisible to yourselves, let me ask you to pardon the somewhat querulous tone of my concluding remarks.

SAMUEL BUTLER.

QUO SAL?

Every generation that cometh doth verily stand on the shoulders of that which hath gone before.-Leo Sestertius.

A LAMP EXTINGUISHED.

HIS paper-destined by the author for the Eagle but by the Editors doubtless about to be relegated to the waste-paper basket-is remarkable in many ways, but in none more than in its origin. The mere facts indeed, the ground plan neither modelled, glazed, nor framed, are the results of years of careful observation, comparison, and rejection like those which gave us an Origin of Species, but the idea, the vital soul which has vivified those dry bones, came like a heavenly visitant, and came during a College debate. Such an event is surely unprecedented, such an unexpected source for an idea should presage something phenomenal. Is the promise fulfilled? It is not for the writer to say; let the Reader read and judge.

The first fact which directed the writer's attention to this subject was the unexplained phenomenon of the Uninhabited Chamber. No, Reader, not the sombre four-post-bedded ghost-haunted chamber of the Moated Grange; not that, but merely the front parlour of the poor struggling for respectability and a social position; the parlour with its Family Bible, bead mats, wax flowers, and daguerreotypes of the last generation. For those who know well admit that when, in the evolution of the social instincts, actual bread, beer, and firing to-day, with prospective bread, beer, and firing as potentialities of to-morrow, have ceased to

occupy all the horizon of their mental vision, the first instincts of the lower classes is for a room which is not lived in. There dwells darkness and other family heirlooms, thence issue damp smells when the door is opened. The other room-or rooms possibly-may be a crowded living room by day and a heated bedroom by night, but the sanctity of the parlour is unviolated. The problem proposed, then, is this. Whence comes this hankering after a room not used, and on what instincts and how acquired is it based?

The answer which solved this problem and co-ordinated with it many other problems hitherto unexplained, and apparently widely different, such as why we wear top hats and what there is of beauty in mountains, is given in the principle that nothing which is true is beautiful.

The word true is here used in its widest sense, that in which it is used in the Seven Lamps of Architecture, where truth is the correspondence with surroundings and fulfilment of the purposes of being.

It is the great principle above stated, hard to appreciate and baffling on account of its very universality, which the poor East-ender grasps in all its worth. He, more than the inhabitant of Kensington, to whom a picture is useful to cover a stain on the wall-paper, and a garden statue as a mask for the path to the area, recognises that what is useful cannot elevate, and that only a room uninhabited and unfit for habitation can really exercise an influence in the sphere of our ethical and æsthetic being. Such a room becomes therefore to the East-ender the symbol of the useless, the unpractical, the beautiful, as opposed to beer and rent and butcher's meat, which are useful and practical things and minister to the gross body. This principle it was which actuated the reformers of the aesthetic movement. They recognised that a blue plate on the floor was a platter for dogs, on the wall an objet d'art for the contemplation of

men and angels. They therefore put fans on the walls, sun-shades in the fire-places, and rejoice in Japanese art which conveys no adequate idea of that which it represents. When Punch puts into the mouth of the poet Postlethwaite the beautiful words, "Why should we be anything? why not remain for ever content merely to exist beautifully?" the British householder, who reads it over his ham and eggs, laughs mindful of a competency made in trade and conscious of being a warm man. Yet Postlethwaite is right, and Punch remains for ever a paying speculation, nor can ever rise to the realms of the truly beautiful.

A public who buy their Ruskin in expensive editions but do not read him, will object that he makes one of his "Lamps" the "Lamp of Truth." That is so, and it is the extinction of that Lamp which this paper is intended to achieve.

Truly our theory is not without support from writers of authority. Does not Keats sing—A thing of beauty is a joy for ever? But obviously that which is useful and fulfils the purpose of its being does not last for ever. We cannot eat our cake and have it, for it is of the nature of cakes, whether of soap or otherwise, to consume away. Only the purely beautiful is eternal, for to exist beautifully, though difficult, is not exhausting.

Yet it is not from authority, but from facts, that a new and revolutionary theory must receive support. Let us then take facts, the two cited at the commencement of this article for instance, and subject them to careful examination.

We wear top hats and we love them. Of this there is no doubt. To not a few of us, a University Sunday lacks an indefinite something, not to be defined, because the top hat is wanting. Why is this? A top hat is always uncomfortable; in a high wind it necessitates an ungraceful and awkward pose of the head; in a hot sun it becomes an oven and bakes