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The poet's health, hitherto robust, was somewhat impaired in 1888, but his vivid interest in affairs and in letters was unabated. He consoled himself with Virgil, Keats, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Euripides, and Mr Leaf's speculations on the composite nature of the Iliad, in which Coleridge, perhaps alone among poets, believed.
The picture of life in the Homeric poems, then, is more like that of, say, 1500-1100 B.C. than of, say, 1000-850 B.C. in Mr. Leaf's opinion. Certainly Homer describes a wealthy aristocracy, subject to an Over-Lord, who rules, by right divine, from "golden Mycenae." We hear of no such potentate in Ionia.
The former wore a dirty turban, the latter a Zebid cap, a wicker-work calotte, composed of the palm leaf's mid-rib: they carried dressed goatskins, as prayer carpets, over their right shoulders dangled huge wooden ink bottles with Lauh or wooden tablets for writing talismans , and from the left hung a greasy bag, containing a tattered copy of the Koran and a small MS. of prayers.
They realize their own events apart, just as in our own consciousness, when anything becomes emphatic, the background fades from observation. Yet the event works back upon the background, as the wavelet works upon the waves, or as the leaf's movements work upon the sap inside the branch.
The standard in both Epics is the same; in both some heroes fall short of the standard. To return to linguistic tests, it is hard indeed to discover what Mr. Leaf's opinion of the value of linguistic tests of lateness really is. Now as Mr. Leaf has entirely changed his mind.
Leaf thinks that, in the case of the Homeric poems, this idea "is not wholly borne out by the facts." In fact, Mr. Leaf's hypothesis, like Helbig's, exhibits a come- and-go between the theory that his late poets clung close to tradition and so kept true to ancient details of life, and the theory that they did quite the reverse in many cases. Of this frequent examples will occur. So far Mr.
Besides, unlike herself, Hilary had her life all before her. It might be a happy life, safe in a good man's tender keeping; those unfailing letters from India seemed to prophecy that it would. But no one could say. Miss Leaf's own experience had not led her to place much faith in either men or happiness.
She even lay awake, in her closet off Miss Leaf's room, whence she could hear the murmur of her two mistresses talking together, long after they retired lay broad awake for an hour or more, trying to put things together the sad things that she felt certain must have happened that day, and wondering what Mr. Ascott could possibly want with the key.
Besides, much of her time was spent in waiting upon "poor Selina," who frequently was, or fancied her self, too ill to take any part in either the school or house duties. Though, the thing being inevitable, she said little about it, Miss Leaf's heart was often sore to see Hilary's pretty hands smeared with blacking of grates, and roughened with scouring of floors.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven; not room enough, without the leaf in the table; one place empty, if the leaf's in. Let's see, Helen Darley, she 'll do well enough to fill it up, why, yes, just the thing, light brown hair, blue eyes, won't my pattern show off well against her?
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