and liberal matron of the Odyssey, the mistress of all hearts of the Iliad, had hitherto been scurvily treated by our poet. His apology to her memory in the play bearing her name is curious. The purport of it is to show that there had been a fearful mistake made all along by the Greeks. The good-for-nothing Helen, for whom they shed so much blood, was a phantasm, a double, a prank of mischievous deities. The real Helen never went near Ilion,—never injured any one, not even her husband,—but passed the score of years between the visit of Paris to Sparta and the fall of that city in a respectable grass-widowhood under the roof of a pious king and a holy prophetess in Egypt. Here was a delightful discovery! A great capital had been sacked and burnt to the ground; a whole nation removed from its place; Greece nearly ruined; thousands of valiant knights hurried to Hades; hundreds of dainty and delicate women told off, like so many sheep, to new owners; the very gods themselves set together by the ears;—and all for nothing—for a shadow that dislimned into thin air the instant it was no longer wanted for troubling and bewildering mankind!
It has been doubted whether there be a comic element in the "Alcestis;" it is far easier to detect one in the "Helen." Menelaus has lost his ship, and gets to land by clinging to its keel. He knows not on what coast he has been wrecked; but wherever it may be, he is not fit to present himself to any respectable person. He says,—
