economy. This allotment, far from degrading or lessening the woman, is really for her advantage and honor, in confiding to her a kind of domestic empire and government, administered only by gentleness, reason, equity and good nature; and in giving her frequent occasions of concealing the most valuable and excellent qualities under the inestimable veil of modesty and submission." We have nothing to add to these sage reflections. reflections. We may with propriety mention, however, in regard to the sources from whence we have drawn the details herein collected, that we do not expect again to be compelled to appeal so unreservedly to the traditions and legends of any period of which we may be treating; and we hope, as our chronological sequence progresses, to arrive, in due time, at that epoch in history, when we may present a record of attested facts in place of an array of marvellous puerilities. PENELOPE. THIS most interesting of the semi-historical heroines of antiquity was born, we may reasonably suppose, some twenty years previous to the Trojan War: the date could not have been far, therefore, from 1214 B.C. She was the daughter of Icarius and Polycaste, and niece of Tyndarus, king of Sparta. Her name is said to have been originally Arnæa, and to have been changed to Penelope in commemoration of the skill and patience which she afterwards displayed in the art of spinning. Ulysses, son of the king of Ithaca, was at first a suitor for the hand of Helen, Tyndarus' daughter and Penelope's cousin, but, disheartened by the great number of his competitors, he solicited the hand of Penelope; his addresses being encouraged by her father, he married her and returned with her to Ithaca. The aged king resigned his crown to his son, and retired to a life of rural solitude ; Ulysses and Penelope lived for a time happily in their island kingdom, reigning in peace over their subjects, and rearing their son Telemachus. In the meantime, Helen had married Menelaüs, who, upon the death of Tyndarus, succeeded to the throne of Sparta. Paris, the son of Priam, king of Troy, now paid his memorable visit to Sparta, requiting the hospitality of his host by abducting his wife-an act which, reprehensible as it was, we may, at this late day, safely omit stigmatizing, inasmuch as without it we should have lost the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Æneid. All who had ever addressed their court to Helen, had bound themselves by oath to unite to protect her, should violence be offered to her person. Ulysses was, therefore, summoned by Menelaüs and his brother, Agamemnon, to join the forces collecting for the chastisement of Paris and the destruction of Troy. He was loath to quit his beloved Penelope, and to avoid the necessity, resorted to stratagem. He counterfeited insanity, and, yoking together a horse and a bull, ploughed the sea-shore and sowed salt in the furrows. Palamedes, the envoy from Menelaus, suspected the artifice and resolved to expose it. He placed the infant Telemachus in the path of the ill-matched team: Ulysses, in whom the father predominated over the masquerader, turned them aside from the furrow, leaving the boy unhurt. Thus detected, he was compelled to depart for the wars. He afterwards revenged himself upon the officious Palamedes by forging a letter of thanks from Priam, by which the Greeks were led to believe that he had furnished supplies to the Trojans; for this imputed offence he was stoned to death by his indignant countrymen. Ulysses accompanied the Greeks to Ilium, and remained during the siege of Troy-ten years according to the time-tables of history, many more in the computation of the desolate Penelope. Upon the fall of the city, he was involved in the disasters which the vengeance of Minerva heaped upon the Grecian ships, and for ten years more wandered from country to country, exposed to constant peril and unable to regain his home. From time to time, an episode of a gratifying nature compensated for the trials he underwent: Calypso certainly atoned for Polyphemus, and Circe, after her spell was broken, was a fair equivalent for Scylla and Charybdis. It is the prudence, dignity and fidelity of Penelope, during these twenty years of separation, that have made her the heroine of poets, the envy of husbands, the dream and the toast of bachelors. During the latter years of the absence of Ulysses, his palace at Ithaca was thronged with princes and peers, importunate and quarrelsome suitors for the hand of the queen, who, they maintained, had long since been made a widow by battle or shipwreck. Her friends and family urged her to abandon the idea of her husband's return, and to choose from among the rival aspirants a father for Telemachus and a sovereign for Ithaca. She exerted all her ingenuity, and put in practice every artifice which she could invent, to defer the period of her final decision. In the seventeenth year of her solitude, she imagined the device which is so indissolubly connected with her name, engaging to make a choice when she should have completed a web which she was then weaving as a funeral ornament for Laertes, Ulysses' father, now rapidly sinking to the grave. The suitors gladly accepted a proposal which seemed to promise a speedy termination to their woes. But Penelope, assiduously unravelling at night what she had woven during the day, protracted for three years more the fatal moment. At the beginning of the fourth, a female attendant disclosed the pious treachery. These incidents are related by Homer in a speech placed in the mouth of Antinoüs, the most turbulent of the suitors. Telemachus had reproached them with riotous conduct, alleging that their prodigality had well-nigh drained the royal coffers. Antinoüs thus replied: "O insolence of youth! whose tongue affords Fond hope to all, and all with hopes deceives. Did not the sun, through heaven's wide azure roll'd, While she, laborious in delusion, spread |