this what milk the ewe may yield during the night.  In the morning, however, Polyphemus milks the ewes again.  Hence it is plain either that he expected his lambs to thrive on one pull per diem at a milked ewe, and to be kind enough not to suck their mothers, though left with them all night through, or else that the writer of the Odyssey had very hazy notions about the relations between lambs and ewes, and of the ordinary methods of procedure on an upland dairy-farm.

In nautical matters the same inexperience is betrayed.  The writer knows all about the corn and wine that must be put on board; the store-room in which these are kept and the getting of them are described inimitably, but there the knowledge ends; the other things put on board are “the things that are generally taken on board ships.”  So on a voyage we are told that the sailors do whatever is wanted doing, but we have no details.  There is a shipwreck, which does duty more than once without the alteration of a word.  I have seen such a shipwreck at Drury Lane.  Anyone, moreover, who reads any authentic account of actual adventures will perceive at once that those of the Odyssey are the creation of one who has had no history.  Ulysses has to make a raft; he makes it about as broad as they generally make a good big ship, but we do not seem to have been at the pains to measure a good big ship.

I will add no more however on this head.  The leading characteristics of the Iliad, as we saw, were love, war, and plunder.  The leading idea of the Odyssey is the infatuation of man, and the key-note is struck in the opening paragraph, where we are told how the sailors of Ulysses must needs, in spite of every warning, kill and eat the cattle of the sun-god, and perished accordingly.

A few lines lower down the same note is struck with even greater emphasis.  The gods have met in council, and Jove happens at the moment to be thinking of AEgisthus, who had met his death at the hand of Agamemnon’s son Orestes, in spite of the solemn warning that Jove had sent him through the mouth of Mercury.  It does not seem necessary for Jove to turn his attention to Clytemnestra, the partner of AEgisthus’s guilt.  Of this lady we are presently told that she was naturally of an excellent disposition, and would never have gone wrong but for the loss of the protector in whose charge Agamemnon had left her.  When she was left alone without an adviser—­ well, if a base designing man took to flattering and misleading her—­what else could be expected?  The infatuation of man, with its corollary, the superior excellence of woman, is the leading theme; next to this come art, religion, and, I am almost ashamed to add, money.  There is no love-business in the Odyssey except the return of a bald elderly married man to his elderly wife and grown-up son after an absence of twenty years, and furious at having been robbed of so much money in the meantime.  But this can hardly be called