Rages unceasingly-and howls and yelps, Anon its waves with loud, terrific roar, Lash with their curling crests the labouring shore, VI. A heap of sluggish ashes, and an ass, If they retire, it is that they may eat: If by the fire, they cram themselves with meat: VII. The weasel-soul'd, the grim, the sad-of-face, VIII. From the soft, waving-maned, the full-fed mare, For fear of soot; the purses of their spouses, Pretending love, they sweep, though not their houses. And, crown'd with flowers, a lovely fragrance sheds. Except a king or prince they chance to find, IX. Another class form'd from the hideous ape, X. Happy the man,-thrice happy surely he! Thrice happy they whom gracious Heaven may bless This the exception: those, and such as those, The ills,-that fill the life of man with woes, Which, in the wisdom of his crafty mind, Jove sends to earth in shape of womankind,Of whom, alas! the fairest and the best A husband knows the blessing not so blest: Since a whole day of happiness, no man Spent with a wife e'er since the world began: Nor soon will gaunt starvation leave that house Where dwells that foe of Gods and man-a spouse. Nay, when his soul is open to delights, Intent on solemn, or on festive rites, This carping fury soon his bliss will blight, For hospitality may never dare To spread the table, if a wife be there, Marriage makes man a simpleton-since he Loud in her praises, he can never see, That as his neighbour's, so his fate must be,— A thraldom, and a bondage, and a yoke Which Jove hath made, and never can be broke ; Perchance while fighting for a worthless wife. SONG OF DEMODOCUS THE BARD BEFORE ULYSSES, IN THE COURT OF KING ALCINOUS. ODYSSEY. LIB. VIII. Translated by Mr Chapman, Trinity College, Cambridge. I. THE Bard, preluding, struck his tuneful lyre, Grief-brooding, while revengeful plans employ II. On its broad base his anvil huge he sets, Incensed with Mars; then to his chamber hies, All round the bed, down hanging from the roof: Of Gods might not discern those wiles of proof: III. Dearest of all his earth-haunts. Nor dark-sighted IV. Thus he to Beauty; she was nothing loth; v. Dreadful his shout; "Ye ever-living Gods, Shaped me a lame foot, is my honour sold By dainty Venus to the Homicide; For he, forsooth, is straight-foot, handsome, bold, But I am halt; for this my parents chide; They should have made me straight, or not have multiplied. VI. "But ye shall see how they their love-watch keep, In amorous twinings-sight I loathe to see; Yet do I think not e'en a little sleep The gifts I paid for her-my spousal gold,- VII. To Vulcan's brass-built house th' Immortals follow The Goddesses kept, shame-faced, all away. To see the cunning nets that them so fast enclose. VII. Then looking to his neighbour one would say: Has overtaken Mars the swift of feet; He lame, this swiftest of the Gods, whose seat He needs must pay for his adulterous feat." Then King Apollo graceful did incline To Hermes, asking him: "Come, messenger divine! IX. "Good-giver! Jove's own son! say, art thou willing, Though thrice so many chains were thrown around: " X. Nor Neptune kept his laugh; but still he pray'd XI. "Nay, then," quoth Vulcan, "I must needs obey;" Free from his bonds, he darted down on Thrace; Fled to her Paphian incense-breathing bowers. There the sweet Graces bathed the Mother-Grace, Blee-true Saxon for complexion. 3 A VOL. XXXV. NO, CCXXI, ADMISSION OF DISSENTERS TO DEGREES IN THE ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES. THE character of the English Universities never stood so high as it does now, and the friends of civil and religious liberty, forsooth, have within these few years seen the necessity of changing their tactics in the manoeu vring of their forces to effect their overthrow. For along while they were most audacious in their abuse of these glorious establishments, and unwearied in their efforts to hold them up to scorn and hatred as the strongholds of bigotry and superstition. Within their walls in vain might you look, they cried, for men of science and learning-you found but a set of monks lazily loitering among the cloisters, or desecrating the chapels with hypocritical prayers. Such was the unceasing slang of the more vulgar crew. Philosophers again spoke of their blind or obstinate resistance to the spirit of the age. They accused them of continuing to teach all the exploded errors of the schools, long after the other great Seminaries of education in Europe had begun to diffuse the grand truths of modern philosophy, and the knowledge of those arts by which the genius of invention and discovery had elevated, enriched, and adorned life. Or they likened them to vessels moored in a river, down which tide and stream were carrying past their sides thousands of adventurous sails, all bound on voyages across the great deep, while the crews of the sheer hulks, leaning lazily over the rotten bulwarks, deluded themselves with the belief that they too were in motion, and drifting along in the midst of that endless fleet. Some such image-though we are inclined in all humility to think that we have so far improved upon it as to make it at once more poetical and more intelligible, without destroying its inapplicability in the least-was, we remember, employed by a great philosopher of the North, and pompously repeated many a time and oft by the more erudite among a people, who, according to a celebrated Eng lish moralist, no bad judge either of individual or national character, had almost all a mouthful, but few or none a bellyful, of that food which is found most nutritive to the nobler faculties of the mind, although unfortunately too many of them were filled to repletion with that sort of provender which turns to wind, and by natural necessity causes eructation. That Scotland has long had good reason to be proud of her own Universities, and of the rapid advancement of her natives from barbarism to civility, is indeed most true; but it was lamentable to hear some of her most liberal spirits, as they loved to call themselves, so far elated by their own reputation, which already is on the wane, and, when at its brightest, shone with borrowed light, as to sneer, in a sense of fancied superiority, at a system of studies of which they knew not even enough to be able to misrepresent them, and were obliged therefore to disparage by generalities conceived in conscious ignorance, and vented in affected scorn. Oh! what retaliation might there then have been! The small storm that was raised, however, soon fell; but the aggressors got a lesson not again to shame themselves by calumnies against the character of institutions venerated by all the noblest spirits of the noblest land on all the earth. They got a lesson rather to honour themselves by assimilating, so far as that might be, and the difference of national circumstances would allow, that system of education which they themselves conducted, to that which, however high might be the notion that the vanity of a people within little more than a century released from bondage to the soil might inspire into their hearts, had received the sanction of the approval of an older and far more cultivated nation, a nation that had "taken the start of this majestic world," and stood on the very summit of renown. But we here in Scotland were soon after that exposure of the "follies of our wise" hushed to silence, while in England a vast majority of the Dissenters continued to assail the Universities more bitterly than ever, because they knew they were the pillars of that Church so hateful in their eyes, and against which they |