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52 challenge which the Trojan prince comes to make on behalf of Paris. Menelaus accepts it, in a few plain and gallant words—he is no orator:—

A truce is agreed upon, to abide the result of this appeal of battle. A messenger from Olympus—Iris, goddess of the Rainbow—comes to warn Helen of the impending duel. And this introduces one of the most beautiful passages in the whole Iliad, to modern taste. Its sentiment and pathos are perfectly level and quiet; but as a natural and life-like yet highly-wrought portrait of a scene in what we may call the social drama, it stands almost without equal or parallel in classical literature.

Helen—the fatal cause of the war, the object of such violent passions and such bitter taunts—is sitting pensively in the palace of her royal father-in-law, writing her own miserable story. She is writing it—not in a three-volumed novel, as a lady who had a private history, more or less creditable, would write it now, but—in a golden tapestry, in which more laborious form it was in those days not unfrequent to write sensational biographies. Iris urges her to be present at the show. The whole reads like the tale of some medieval tournament, except that Helen herself is the prize of victory as well as the Queen of Beauty. Attended by her maidens, she goes down to the place where the aged Priam, like the kings of the Old