Of course everyone else sends up his tripod and his cauldron, but we hear nothing about any, either tripod or cauldron, from King Alcinous.  He is very fussy next morning stowing them under the ship’s benches, but his time and trouble seem to be the extent of his contribution.  It is hardly necessary to say that Ulysses had to go away without the 250 pounds, and that we never hear of the promised goblet being presented.  Still he had done pretty well.

I have not quoted anything like all the absurd remarks made by Alcinous, nor shown you nearly as completely as I could do if I had more time how obviously the writer is quietly laughing at him in her sleeve.  She understands his little ways as she understands those of Menelaus, who tells Telemachus and Pisistratus that if they like he will take them a personally conducted tour round the Peloponnese, and that they can make a good thing out of it, for everyone will give them something—­fancy Helen or Queen Arete making such a proposal as this.  They are never laughed at, but then they are women, whereas Alcinous and Menelaus are men, and this makes all the difference.

And now in conclusion let me point out the irony of literature in connection with this astonishing work.  Here is a poem in which the hero and heroine have already been married many years before it begins:  it is marked by a total absence of love-business in such sense as we understand it:  its interest centres mainly in the fact of a bald elderly gentleman, whose little remaining hair is red, being eaten out of house and home during his absence by a number of young men who are courting the supposed widow—­a widow who, if she be fair and fat, can hardly also be less than forty.  Can any subject seem more hopeless?  Moreover, this subject so initially faulty is treated with a carelessness in respect of consistency, ignorance of commonly known details, and disregard of ordinary canons, that can hardly be surpassed, and yet I cannot think that in the whole range of literature there is a work which can be decisively placed above it.  I am afraid you will hardly accept this; I do not see how you can be expected to do so, for in the first place there is no even tolerable prose translation, and in the second, the Odyssey, like the Iliad, has been a school book for over two thousand five hundred years, and what more cruel revenge than this can dullness take on genius?  The Iliad and Odyssey have been used as text-books for education during at least two thousand five hundred years, and yet it is only during the last forty or fifty that people have begun to see that they are by different authors.  There was, indeed, so I learn from Colonel Mure’s valuable work, a band of scholars some few hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, who refused to see the Iliad and Odyssey as by the same author, but they were snubbed and snuffed out, and for more than two thousand years were considered to have been finally refuted.  Can there be any