“So saying, he awakened in his soul regret
Of his own sire; softly he placed his hand
On Priam’s hand, and pushed him gently away.
Remembrance melted both. Rolling before
Achilles feet, Priam his son deplored,
Wide slaughtering Hector, and Achilles wept
By turns his father, and by turns his friend
Patroclus: sounds of sorrow filled the tent.”
Beside the Iliad, another epic, divided into twenty-four books, and entitled the Odyssey, with a number of smaller pieces, are attributed to Homer, and doubtless upon good and substantial grounds. The Odyssey is a tale of adventures, like Robinson Crusoe, and Sinbad the Sailor, heightened by an object, and dignified by a moral far above these works. It tells us what befel Ulysses, in returning from the siege of Troy to his home in Greece; and is wrought up with wonderful powers of invention and fancy. It is esteemed inferior, on the whole, to the Iliad, and an eminent critic has said, that, in the former, Homer appears like the rising, and in the latter, like the setting sun.
[15] These Marbles consist of a large collection of busts, statues, altars, inscriptions, mutilated figures, &c., formed by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, in the early part of the seventeenth century, and presented to the University of Oxford, by Henry Howard, the earl’s grandson. They were obtained in various parts of Greece; many are of great antiquity and of great value, as well for the light they shed upon history as upon the arts, customs, and manners of past ages.
CONFUCIUS.
This greatest of Chinese philosophers was born in the petty kingdom of Lú, now the province of Shántung, in the year 549 B. C.—the same year that Cyrus became king of the Medes and Persians. The Chinese, in their embellishments of his history, tell us that his birth was attended with heavenly music, filling the air; that two dragons were seen winding over the roof; that five old men appeared at the door, and after consulting together, suddenly vanished; and that a unicorn brought to his mother a tablet in his mouth. It is also related that when he was born, five characters were seen on his breast, declaring him to be “the maker of a rule for settling the world.” These and other marvels are a part of the established biography of the philosopher, as received by the Chinese.