eats in history.

This difficulty, inherent in navigation as a subject for the Epic Muse,
has, I think, been very shrewdly detected and hit off in a parody of Mr
Noyes' poem by a young friend of mine, Mr Wilfred Blair:--

Meanwhile the wind had changed, and Francis Drake
Put down the helm and drove against the seas--
Once more the wind changed, and the simple seaman,
Full fraught with weather wisdom, once again
Put down the helm and so drove on--_et cetera_.

Now Homer actually has performed this feat which we declare to be next to
impossible. He actually does convey Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca, by a
ten years' voyage too; he actually has narrated that voyage to us in
plain straightforward words; and, what is more, he actually has made a
superb epic of it. Yes, but when you come to dissect the Odyssey, what
amazing artifice is found under that apparently straightforward
tale!--eight years of the ten sliced out, to start with, and
magnificently presented to Circe

Where that Aeaean isle forgets the main

--and (one may add), so forgetting, avoids the technical difficulties
connected therewith.

Note the space given to Telemachus and his active search for the lost
hero: note too how the mass of Odysseus' seafaring adventures is
condensed into a reported speech--a traveller's tale at the court of
Alcinoues. Virgil borrowed this trick, you remember; and I dare to swear
that had it fallen to Homer to attempt the impossible saga of Nelson's
pursuit after Villeneuve he would have achieved it triumphantly--by means
of a tale told in the first person by a survivor to Lady Hamilton. Note,
again, how boldly (being free to deal with an itinerary of which his
audience knew nothing but surmised that it comprehended a vast deal of
the marvellous, spaced at irregular distances) Homer works in a shipwreck
or a miracle wherever the action threatens to flag. Lessing, as you know,
devoted several pages of the "Laokoeon" to the shield of Achilles; to
Homer's craft in depicting it as it grew under Hephaestus' hammer: so
that we are intrigued by the process of manufacture instead of being
wearied by a description of the ready-made article; so also (if one may
presume to add anything to Lessing) that we are cunningly flattered in a
sense that the shield is being made for _us._ Well, that is one artifice
out of many: but if you would gauge at all Homer's resource and subtlety
in technique I recommend you to