struct out of these materials states or societies in which men and women could live who possessed every quality that our century would accord to the most perfect representatives of the sexes. It is more than conceivable that in Homer's time there were types like Achilles in which the national character was largely reflected. It must have been the fact that there were traditions of such characters which Homer only touched with that shaping spirit of imagination which gives the highest truth to forms it bodies forth. Take one of the naked, forked creatures, whom Mr. Spencer would draw out of his savage life in South Sea Islands or under the torrid zone of Africa or from Terra del Fuego, and compare him with the hero of the Iliad. As well compare him with Godfrey of Bouillon, Francis I, Bayard, Sir Philip Sidney, Ignatius of Loyola, with any man who realized in any degree one's conception of the Christian gentleman. The Iliad reflects how men thought and felt more than ten centuries before our era; and this way of looking at things, judging about them, are most material facts if it be contended that social evolution was the moulding hammering instrument which made the poor, wretched, wandering savage the being whom Hamlet describes so finely.
When Hesiod laments that he was born in the fifth age it is the fierce anguish of a spirit like that of Lucretius nearly ten centuries later, who railed at gods powerless to remedy the evils under which the world was dying. I contrast the opening lines of the seventh book of Paradise Lost, where Milton, with a weak regretfulness, implicitly recalls the memory of better days for himself, with Hesiod railing at the unkind influences which reserved him for the Iron Age—the age of fraud and masterful oppression. There was a partial revival of the spirit of the Age of Gold, when the great league against Troy for a principle quickened the dead or sleeping virtues of king and churl. It was a crusade of the Heroic Age and reacted on all the societies of Grecian ancestry or name.
This, I think, would bear a little analysis even though I should be compelled to pass over some other matters in refer-
