love-business; it is at the utmost domesticity.  There is a charming young princess, Nausicaa, but though she affects a passing tenderness for the elderly hero of her creation as soon as Minerva has curled his bald old hair for him and tittivated him up all over, she makes it abundantly plain that she will not look at a single one of her actual flesh and blood admirers.  There is a leading young gentleman, Telemachus, who is nothing if he is not [Greek], or canny, well-principled, and discreet; he has an amiable and most sensible young male friend who says that he does not like crying at meal times—­he will cry in the forenoon on an empty stomach as much as anyone pleases, but he cannot attend properly to his dinner and cry at the same time.  Well, there is no lady provided either for this nice young man or for Telemachus.  They are left high and dry as bachelors.  Two goddesses indeed, Circe and Calypso, do one after the other take possession of Ulysses, but the way in which he accepts a situation which after all was none of his seeking, and which it is plain he does not care two straws about, is, I believe, dictated solely by a desire to exhibit the easy infidelity of Ulysses himself in contrast with the unswerving constancy and fidelity of his wife Penelope.  Throughout the Odyssey the men do not really care for women, nor the women for men; they have to pretend to do so now and again, but it is a got-up thing, and the general attitude of the sexes towards one another is very much that of Helen, who says that her husband Menelaus is really not deficient in person or understanding:  or again of Penelope herself, who, on being asked by Ulysses on his return what she thought of him, said that she did not think very much of him nor very little of him; in fact, she did not think much about him one way or the other.  True, later on she relents and becomes more effusive; in fact, when she and Ulysses sat up talking in bed and Ulysses told her the story of his adventures, she never went to sleep once.  Ulysses never had to nudge her with his elbow and say, “Come, wake up, Penelope, you are not listening”; but, in spite of the devotion exhibited here, the love-business in the Odyssey is artificial and described by one who had never felt it, whereas in the Iliad it is spontaneous and obviously genuine, as by one who knows all about it perfectly well.  The love-business in fact of the Odyssey is turned on as we turn on the gas—­when we cannot get on without it, but not otherwise.

A fascinating brilliant girl, who naturally adopts for her patroness the blue-stocking Minerva; a man-hatress, as clever girls so often are, and determined to pay the author of the Iliad out for his treatment of her sex by insisting on its superior moral, not to say intellectual, capacity, and on the self-sufficient imbecility of man unless he has a woman always at his elbow to keep him tolerably straight and in his proper place—­this, and not the musty fusty