to be a special allusion to the Peninsula of Spain as abounding in olives, eλalai.

Fig. 162,

gives a view of Menelaus as drawn from his prototype in Spain, his face fronting the west.

Helen, the wife of Menelaus, is the Mediterranean Sea;* which as washing the shores of

So stood the account of Helen when these chapters were first printed, (in 1806) and because of the remarks that follow respecting the ancient modes of severally personifying men and women, I have let it stand so still, though well convinced that the character of Helen is to be explained in a very different manner; but such explanation belongs to a copious and important subject, and may be given much more conveniently on another occasion. is therefore reserved.

It

Spain, and being a sea of the dominion over which Spain might naturally be jealous, may well be said to be married to that country in the person of Menelaus. This personification of a sea is sufficient to do away all the inconsistencies in respect of the age and manners of Helen, upon which some writers have been fond of descanting; since undoubtedly a sea may be old or young, beautiful in a calm, or the reverse in a storm, just as it may suit the fancy of the same or different poets to exhibit it. And it may be right to notice here, that it is the practice of Homer, and the rest of the ancient poets (for reasons sufficiently obvious, relative to the monthly changes of the tides), to describe the sea, or detached portions of it, under the persons of women, and the land and its divisions under those of men; as to rivers, sometimes a male personification is given to them, as to Scamander, Alphæus, &c., and sometimes they are represented as females, under the character of nymphs.*

* There is a close analogy between this method and

It is remarkable, that in the first book, before the action of the Iliad begins, in regard to warlike matters, an incident is noticed concerning a pestilence; and the greatest importance is with reason attached to this incident. Pestilences are very frequently mentioned in the early periods of history, and Livy has scarcely a single book that does not advert to their recurrence. It seems accordingly to have been considered by Homer that no expedition, like the one fabulously supposed in the Iliad, could have been set on foot, and that the policy of the different nations of the world, which constantly comes into action in the poem, could not have been established as there imagined, till some means had been found sufficient to prevent or check the ravages occasioned by

that observed in forming, from the pictures in the moon, the various characters noticed in the four preceding volumes; for the male characters introduced in the pieces there explained, are almost invariably drawn from the shadows of the moon, and the female from her lights, these last resembling water encompassing land.

those pestilences. That happy end once obtained, and the condition of men improved by a circumstance so essential as general health, their views would soon be enlarged, the arts would spring into life, and all those results take place by degrees, to which navigation, commerce, war, and policy conduct. It may be observed accordingly, that the forces of the different powers engaged in the war of the Iliad, are not marshalled at the commencement of the poem, as they might naturally have been expected to be; but that the catalogue, in which they are so marshalled, is postponed to an account of the general cause and means of cure of the pestilence in question.

In a treatise upon that subject, which constituted one of those printed and given away some years since, as mentioned in the preface to the first volume, I had occasion to state, that the ancients were of opinion that the sands of which almost the whole of Africa is composed, had been brought down, in the lapse of ages, from the opposite coast of South America, by means of the currents of the vast rivers that flow there; and

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that those sands had been originally cast up by the numerous volcanoes of America, (just as we have lately known them to be cast up for many successive days, upon the re-opening within this last year of the ancient volcano in the island of St. Vincent, called la Souffriere,) and further, that from thence it was that gold dust (the produce of America, and not of Africa,) had been in all ages found among the sands of Africa. In conformity with this statement it is observable, that Achilles, who, as will appear presently, represents Africa, says of the opposite continent of America, in speaking of it in Il. 366, under the name of Ηετιων, HETI, (with reference to its everlasting past existence,)

Ωχομεθ' ες Θήβην, ιερήν πολιν Ηετίωνος

Την δε διεπραθομεντε και ηγομεν ενθαδε παντα,

that is, that it was all burned up with fire, (alluding to its volcanoes,) and that its ashes had been conveyed to his own country, Africa. The result of this, in the opinion of the ancients, was, that those vast rivers of America having their natural