opportunity, murdered him! It was the ill reward of a humane action, a melancholy end for so brave a man; but

so it was with nearly all those adventurous spirits-Spanish, Portuguese, English-good and bad alike for as the fool dieth so dieth the wise-and there is no difference in the chance of the sea and the perils of strange lands, or human treachery. Look round on the group, before we take leave of them, and think of their end;-how many of them were cut off in the flower of their days;-how few laid their bones in the graves of their sires!

Columbus died broken hearted; Balboa, discoverer of the South Sea, was condemned on a false charge and put to death; Cortes, after adding some of the richest provinces to Spain, perished in neglect and obloquy. Pizarro was murdered by his own confederates; Humphrey Gilbert went down in a storm at sea; Raleigh laid his head on the block; Drake died wearied and disappointed; Davis was treacherously assassinated. Life with them was no summer holiday; it was a hard, rough, thorny path, But they smoothed the way for us, with aching brow and bleeding feet; and we employ the result of their labours and bless their memory for the work they did.

""Tis the poet's gift

To melt our frozen waters into tears,

By sympathy with sorrows not our own

By wakening memory with those mournful notes,
Whose music is the thought of early years,

When truth was on the lip, and feelings wore

The sweetness and the greatness of their morn."

OUR next group of great men comprises those famous men who have left behind them imperishable workspoets who ever live to stir the heart, to quicken the imagination, to awaken healthy aspirations after all that is good and beautiful and true. Our sketches must neces

sarily be limited to a few of these beautiful wizardswizards whose potent spells have conjured from the "vasty

deep" of the human intellect-the human heart-creations as deathless as their creators.

Homer, the blind bard of ancient Greece, sang of Achilles' wrath, of Troy's proud city, of Helen's beauty, Priam's grief; and a strange interest envelopes the man who, while all the world without was dark and strange, could from within bring forth a world of light and beauty, and sing in noble and imperishable verse the bravery of Hellenic heroes. Who was this Homer? To us all he seems more shadowy than real. He partakes of the mystic splendour of his own verse; his country a classic land, from whose temples and palaces the glory has departed; but the man speaks to us through the book, and tells the story of fierce war and faithful love in strains that stir the heart more than a trumpet. But who is this Homer? Is he a man or a myth- -a man or a number of men-did he compose the books that bear his name, or merely string together the ballads of others ?-Wolf and other learned critics have maintained that the man Homer never lived; that the blind bard is a mere creation of the fancy; that both the Iliad and Odyssey were prepared by a number of authors known as the Homerida. But to us it is easier to believe in one Homer than many; the internal evidence contributes, by the strict identity of plan and purpose, to further this view of the matter: whatever modifications may afterwards have taken place, one great mind presided at its formation-why not Homer? As soon let us deny an individual existence to Shakspeare and Milton as rob Homer of his personal being.

We know but little of the man, except that he is the most ancient and most celebrated of the Greek poets. He lived about a thousand years before Christ was born, and is supposed to have been the contemporary of that blind hero-saint who avenged himself for his two eyes by destroying himself and his foes together. Seven cities contest the honour of giving birth to Homer-Smyrna, Chios, Colophin, Salamis, Rhodes, Argos, Athens. Symrna and Chios are supposed to have the best claim on the coveted honour. According to the traditions, his mother's name was Critheis. She afterwards married a

skilled musician, Phemius by name, a wise, sagacious man, who gathered round him many young disciples, and exerted himself to cultivate to the uttermost the mind and heart of his step-son. Imagine Homer learning the

Greek alphabet; conceive the idea of his first effort to produce harmonious number; fancy him, fair and beautiful to look upon, listening with wrapt attention as Phemius sings of some heroic action done by gods or men, and sweeps his fingers over the lyre in cadence to the

song. We may readily suppose that he would eagerly gather up the traditions and legends of the people; that his vivid imagination would give form and colour to scanty details; that his enthusiasm would be fired by heroic story-kept alive by the scenery of his native land, the graceful and poetical character of the people. It is said that he became a teacher; that he went abroad; travelled over the known world; came back to find himself forgotten; that he fell into poverty, and found no one ready to extend to him the help he needed; that one of the heaviest afflictions which can fall upon man came upon him; and that, blind and poor as Bartimeus that sat by the wayside begging, Homer went reciting his verses for daily bread. It is probable that he resembled the minstrels of medieval times-the harpers who wandered from castle to castle and beguiled the feasters with songs of war or love; this, if we accept the popular story, is the origin of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the first we have the anger of Achilles, the misfortunes of the Grecian army before Troy during the absence of that hero. In the second we have the wanderings of Ulysses from land to land after the capture of Troy. They are precisely the sort of poems which would be popular among the Greeks, and serve to win the notice of sage and soldier, as the blind bard sang as one inspired. Thus we think of the origin of those Greek masterpieces-we associate them with an individual existence-an identified authorwe believe in the man Homer.

In the middle of the twelfth century there arose in Italy a poet, whose extraordinary genius and terrible misfortunes excited both the admiration and compassion of the world. This was Dante Alighieri.

This great poet came of a noble Florentine family, at a period when the Italian States were rent asunder by the conflicting interests of different princes, and when, to escape the anxiety and misery of war, its battles, triumphs, and defeats, was a thing impossible for one in Dante's position. The whole life of this man was a long series of misfortunes. He possessed ability of a wondrously miscellaneous nature-could do more than tune his lyre and sing of