whose occupations must needs be
sedentary and stooping; while the song which accompanied the game at once
filled the lungs regularly and rhythmically, and prevented violent
motion, or unseemly attitude. We, the civilised, need physiologists to
remind us of these simple facts, and even then do not act on them. Those
old half-barbarous Greeks had found them out for themselves, and,
moreover, acted on them.

But fair Nausicaa must have been--some will say--surely a mere child of
nature, and an uncultivated person?

So far from it, that her whole demeanour and speech show culture of the
very highest sort, full of "sweetness and light."--Intelligent and
fearless, quick to perceive the bearings of her strange and sudden
adventure, quick to perceive the character of Ulysses, quick to answer
his lofty and refined pleading by words as lofty and refined, and pious
withal;--for it is she who speaks to her handmaids the once so famous
words:

"Strangers and poor men all are sent from Zeus;
And alms, though small, are sweet"

Clear of intellect, prompt of action, modest of demeanour, shrinking from
the slightest breath of scandal; while she is not ashamed, when Ulysses,
bathed and dressed, looks himself again, to whisper to her maidens her
wish that the Gods might send her such a spouse.--This is Nausicaa as
Homer draws her; and as many a scholar and poet since Homer has accepted
her for the ideal of noble maidenhood. I ask my readers to study for
themselves her interview with Ulysses, in Mr. Worsley's translation, or
rather in the grand simplicity of the original Greek, {76} and judge
whether Nausicaa is not as perfect a lady as the poet who imagined
her--or, it may be, drew her from life--must have been a perfect
gentleman; both complete in those "manners" which, says the old proverb,
"make the man:" but which are the woman herself; because with her--who
acts more by emotion than by calculation--manners are the outward and
visible tokens of her inward and spiritual grace, or disgrace; and flow
instinctively, whether good or bad, from the instincts of her inner
nature.

True, Nausicaa could neither read nor write. No more, most probably,
could the author of the Odyssey. No more, for that matter, could
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, though they were plainly, both in mind and
manners, most highly-cultivated men. Reading and writing, of course,
have now become necessaries of humanity; and are to be given to every
hu