"Where the fair columns of St Clement stand,

Whose straiten'd bounds encroach upon the Strand;
Where the low pent-house bows the walker's head,
And the rough pavement wounds the yielding tread;
Where not a post protects the narrow space,
And, strung in twines, combs dangle in thy face;
Summon at once thy courage, rouse thy care,

Stand firm, look back, be resolute, beware.

Forth issuing from steep lanes, the collier's steeds
Drag the black load; another cart succeeds;

Team follows team, crowds heap'd on crowds appear,

And wait impatient till the road grow clear.'

There is a touch in the winter picture in the same poem, which everybody will recognise :

"At White's the harness'd chairman idly stands,

And swings around his waist his tingling hands."

The bewildered passenger in the Seven Dials is compared to Theseus in the Cretan Labyrinth. And thus we come round to the point at which we began.

Before we rest our wings, however, we must take another dart over the city, as far as Stratford-at-Bow, where, with all due tenderness for boarding-school French, a joke of Chaucer's has existed as a piece of local humour for nearly four hundred and fifty years. Speaking of the Prioress, who makes such a delicate figure among his Canterbury Pilgrims, he tells us, among her other accomplishments, that-

"French she spake full faire and featously;"

adding, with great gravity-

"After the school of Stratford-atte-Bowe;

For French of Paris was to her unknowe."

[NOTE. The "eminent writer on legislation" mentioned in p. 40 as occupying Milton's house in Westminster, was Jeremy Bentham ; the previous tenant-a "celebrated critic and metaphysician "-was Hazlitt. The two "powerful and deep-spirited writers" alluded to as scholars at Christ's Hospital (p. 41), were Coleridge and Lamb. London has altered a good deal since this essay was written. The College of Physicians, for instance, has gone, and Picket Street, which Leigh Hunt mentions as a recent improvement (it supplanted Butcher Row), is now a thing of the past.-E. O.]

ON THE HOUSEHOLD GODS OF THE

TH

ANCIENTS.

HE Ancients had three kinds of household gods,—the Daimon (Dæmon) or Genius, the Penates, and the Lares. The first was supposed to be a spirit allotted to every man from his birth, some say with a companion, and that one of them was a suggester of good thoughts, and the other of evil. It seems, however, that the Genius was a personification of the conscience, or rather of the prevailing impulses of the mind, or the other self of a man; and it was in this sense most likely that Socrates condescended to speak of his well-known Dæmon, Genius, or Familiar Spirit, who, as he was a good man, always advised him to a good end. The Genius was thought to paint ideas upon the mind in as lively a manner as if in a lookingglass; upon which we chose which of them to adopt. Spenser, a most learned as well as imaginative poet, describes it, in one of his most comprehensive though not most poetical stanzas, as

"That celestial Powre, to whom the care
Of life, and generation of all

That lives, pertaine in charge particulare;
Who wondrous things concerning our welfàre,
And straunge phantomes, doth lett us ofte foresee,
And ofte of secret ills bids us beware:

That is our Selfe, whom though we do not see,
Yet each doth in himselfe it well perceive to bee.

"Therefore a god him sage antiquity

Did wisely make.”—Faery Queene, Book II. st. 47.

Of the belief in an Evil Genius, a celebrated example is furnished in Plutarch's account of Brutus's vision, of which Shakspeare has given so fine a version (Julius Cæsar, Act IV. sc. 3). Beliefs of this kind seem traceable from one superstition to another, and in some instances are no doubt immediately so. But fear, and ignorance, and even the humility of knowledge, are at hand to furnish them, where precedent is wanting. There is no doubt, however, that the Romans, who copied and in general vulgarised the Greek mythology, took their Genius from the Greek Daimon; and, as the Greek word has survived and taken shape in the common word Dæmon, which by scornful reference to the Heathen religion came at last to signify a Devil, so the Latin word Genius, not having been used by the translators of the Greek Testament, has survived with a better meaning, and is employed to express our most genial and intellectual faculties. Such and such a man is said to indulge his geniushe has a genius for this and that art--he has a noble genius, an airy genius, an original and peculiar genius. And as the Romans, from attributing a genius to every man at his birth, came to attribute one to places and to soils, and other more comprehensive peculiarities, so we have adopted the same use of the term into our poetical phraseology. We speak also of the genius, or idiomatic peculiarity, of a language. One of the most curious and edifying uses of the word Genius took place in the English translation of the French "Arabian Nights," which speaks of our old friends the Genie and the Genies. This is nothing more than the French word retained from the original translator, who applied the Roman word Genius to the Arabian Dive or Elf.

One of the stories with which Pausanias has enlivened his description of Greece is relative to a Genius. He says that one of the companions of Ulysses having been killed by the people of Temesa, they were fated to sacrifice a beautiful virgin every year to his manes. They were about to immolate one as usual, when Euthymus, a conqueror in the Olympic Games,

touched with pity at her fate and admiration of her beauty, fell in love with her, and resolved to try if he could not put an end to so terrible a custom. He accordingly got permission from the state to marry her, provided he could rescue her from her dreadful expectant. He armed himself, waited in the temple, and the Genius appeared. It was said to have been of an appalling presence. Its shape was every way formidable, its colour of an intense black; and it was girded about with a wolfskin. But Euthymus fought and conquered it; upon which it fled madly, not only beyond the walls, but the utmost bounds of Temesa, and rushed into the sea.

The Penates were gods of the house and family. Collectively speaking, they also presided over cities, public roads, and at last over all places with which men were conversant. Their chief government, however, was supposed to be over the most inner and secret part of the house, and the subsistence and welfare of its inmates. They were chosen at will out of the number of the gods, as the Roman in modern times chose his favourite saint. In fact, they were only the higher gods themselves, descending into a kind of household familiarity. They were the personification of a particular Providence. The most striking mention of the Penates which we can call to mind is in one of Virgil's most poetical passages. It is where they appear to Æneas, to warn him from Crete, and announce his destined empire in Italy (Book III. v. 147):

"Nox erat, et terris animalia somnus habebat.
Effigies sacræ Divum, Phrygiique Penates,
Quos mecum a Trojâ, mediisque ex ignibus urbis
Extuleram, visi ante oculos adstare jacentis

In somnis, multo manifesti lumine, quà se

Plena insertas fundebat Luna fenestras. "

per

'Twas night; and sleep was on all living things.
I lay, and saw before my very eyes
Dread shapes of gods, and Phrygian deities,
The great Penates; whom with reverent joy
I bore from out the heart of burning Troy.
Plainly I saw them, standing in the light
Which the moon pour'd into the room that night.

And again, after they had addressed him :

"Nec sopor illud erat; sed coram agnoscere vultus,
Velatasque comas, præsentiaque ora videbar:
Tum gelidus toto manabat corpore sudor."

It was no dream: I saw them face to face,
Their hooded hair; and felt them so before
My being, that I burst at every pore.

The Lares, or Lars, were the lesser and most familiar household gods; and though their offices were afterwards extended a good deal, in the same way as those of the Penates, with whom they are often wrongly confounded, their principal sphere was the fire-place. This was in the middle of the room; and the statues of the Lares generally stood about it in little niches. They are said to have been in the shape of monkeys; more likely mannikins, or rude little human images. Some were made of wax, some of stone, and others doubtless of any material for sculpture. They were represented with good-natured grinning countenances, were clothed in skins, and had little dogs at their feet. Some writers make them the offspring of the goddess Mania, who presided over the spirits of the dead; and suppose that originally they were the same as those spirits; which is a very probable as well as agreeable superstition, the old nations of Italy having been accustomed to bury their dead in their houses. Upon this supposition, the good or benevolent spirits were called Familiar Lares, and the evil or malignant ones Larvæ and Lemures. Thus Milton, in his awful "Hymn on the Nativity" :

In urns and altars round,

A drear and dying sound

Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint;

And the chill marble seems to sweat,

While each peculiar Power foregoes his wonted seat."

But Ovid tells a story of a gossiping nymph Lara, who, having

D