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He made codes like Justinian, he dictated like Caesar, his conversation was mingled with the lightning-flash of Pascal, with the thunderclap of Tacitus, he made history and he wrote it, his bulletins are Iliads, he combined the cipher of Newton with the metaphor of Mahomet, he left behind him in the East words as great as the pyramids, at Tilsit he taught Emperors majesty, at the Academy of Sciences he replied to Laplace, in the Council of State be held his own against Merlin, he gave a soul to the geometry of the first, and to the chicanery of the last, he was a legist with the attorneys and sidereal with the astronomers; like Cromwell blowing out one of two candles, he went to the Temple to bargain for a curtain tassel; he saw everything; he knew everything; which did not prevent him from laughing good-naturedly beside the cradle of his little child; and all at once, frightened Europe lent an ear, armies put themselves in motion, parks of artillery rumbled, pontoons stretched over the rivers, clouds of cavalry galloped in the storm, cries, trumpets, a trembling of thrones in every direction, the frontiers of kingdoms oscillated on the map, the sound of a superhuman sword was heard, as it was drawn from its sheath; they beheld him, him, rise erect on the horizon with a blazing brand in his hand, and a glow in his eyes, unfolding amid the thunder, his two wings, the grand army and the old guard, and he was the archangel of war!"
Now, as I hate to drink water, brother topers, I protest it would be impossible to make eighteen goatskins hold the description of all the good meat they brought before us, though it were written in characters as small as those in which were penned Homer's Iliads, which Tully tells us he saw enclosed in a nutshell.
Because, as the vague Iliads of ancient heroes or the nebulous records of the savage gentlemen of the Middle Ages make small specific impingement on our consciousness today, so also even now begin the tales of our own old frontier to assume a haziness, an unreality, which makes them seem less history than folklore.
For they are not only subject to those five curses with which Home begins his Iliads, as says the Greek epigram, but six hundred; as being ever hunger-starved and slovens in their schools schools, did I say? Nay, rather cloisters, bridewells, or slaughterhouses grown old among a company of boys, deaf with their noise, and pined away with stench and nastiness.
My father looked from one to the other, but did not break his silence. "They haven't put you to the Iliads yet, I suppose," says the captain, helping himself to a mug of our home-brewed cider, "but you know, neighbor Ellery, 'twas an apple that set the Greeks and Trojans by the ears, and 'tis apples, or rather the want of 'em, that is like to put discord between some of our families hereabout."
If the hero's chief quality be vicious as, for example, the choler and obstinate desire of vengeance in Achilles yet the moral is instructive; and besides, we are informed in the very proposition of the "Iliads" that this anger was pernicious, that it brought a thousand ills on the Grecian camp.
Brutus doth also bear witness of another experiment of this nature, who willing, through this exploratory way by lot, to learn what the event and issue should be of the Pharsalian battle wherein he perished, he casually encountered on this verse, said of Patroclus in the Sixteenth of the Iliads Alla me moir oloe, kai Letous ektanen uios. Fate, and Latona's son have shot me dead.
Macaulay was only too easily bored, and those whom he considered fools he by no means suffered gladly. He once amused his sisters by pouring out whole Iliads of extempore doggrel upon the head of an unfortunate country squire of their acquaintance, who had a habit of detaining people by the button, and who was especially addicted to the society of the higher order of clergy
I am of opinion, were all his voluminous centuries of fabulous relations compiled, they would vie in number with the Iliads of many fore-running ages. You shall many times find in his gazettas, pasquils, and corrantos miserable distractions: here a city taken by force long before it be besieged; there a country laid waste before ever the enemy entered.
We cannot escape from the past, if we would; we have a right to inherit all the previous life of men that does not surfeit us and impede our proper work, but let us stop our unavailing sighs for Iliads. The newspaper gathers and circulates all true achievements faster than blind poets can plod round with the story.
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