ere to associate any one with him it would be Herodotus, and I
believe all I have said of the Homeric landscape will be found equally
true of the Herodotean, as assuredly it will be of the Platonic;--the
contempt, which Plato sometimes expresses by the mouth of Socrates,
for the country in general, except so far as it is shady, and has
cicadas and running streams to make pleasant noises in it, being
almost ludicrous. But Homer is the great type, and the more notable
one because of his influence on Virgil, and, through him, on Dante,
and all the after ages: and, in like manner, if we can get the
abstract of mediaeval landscape out of Dante, it will serve us as well
as if we had read all the songs of the troubadours, and help us to the
farther changes in derivative temper, down to all modern time.

I think, therefore, the reader may safely accept the conclusions about
Greek landscape which I have got for him out of Homer; and in these he
will certainly perceive something very different from the usual
imaginations we form of Greek feelings. We think of the Greeks as
poetical, ideal, imaginative, in the way that a modern poet or
novelist is; supposing that their thoughts about their mythology and
world were as visionary and artificial as ours are: but I think the
passages I have quoted show that it was not so, although it may be
difficult for us to apprehend the strange minglings in them of the
elements of faith, which, in our days, have been blended with other
parts of human nature in a totally different guise. Perhaps the Greek
mind may be best imagined by taking, as its groundwork, that of a
good, conscientious, but illiterate Scotch Presbyterian Border farmer
of a century or two back, having perfect faith in the bodily
appearances of Satan and his imps; and in all kelpies, brownies, and
fairies. Substitute for the indignant terrors in this man's mind, a
general persuasion of the _Divinity_, more or less beneficent, yet
faultful, of all these beings; that is to say, take away his belief in
the demoniacal malignity of the fallen spiritual world, and lower, in
the same degree, his conceptions of the angelical, retaining for him
the same firm faith in both; keep his ideas about flowers and
beautiful scenery much as they are,--his delight in regular ploughed
land and meadows, and a neat garden (only with rows of gooseberry
bushes instead of vines), being, in all probability, about accurately
representative of the feelings of