All through Livingstone's life the real was to predominate over the ideal; and so it was at this period of it. He had a great dislike to purely sentimental or descriptive poetry, preferring to all others those battle-ballads, like the _Lays of Rome_, which stir the blood like a trumpet, or those love-songs which heat it like rough strong wine.
He was very fond of Homer, too. He liked the diapason of those sonorous hexameters, that roll on, sinking and swelling with the ebb and flow of a stormy sea. I hear his voice--deep-toned and powerful even at that early age--finishing the story of Poseidon and his beautiful prize--their bridal-bed laid in the hollow of a curling wave--
_"Porphureon d' ara kuma peristathê, oureï ison, Kurtôthen, krupsen de Theon thnêtên te gunaika."_
And yet they say that the glorious old Sciote was a myth, and the Odyssey a magazine worked out by clever contributors. They might as well assert that all his marshals would have made up one Napoleon.
I remember how we used to pass in review the beauties of old time, for whom "many drew swords and died," whose charms convulsed kingdoms and ruined cities, who called the stars after their own names.
Ah! Gyneth and Ida, peerless queens of beauty, it was exciting, doubtless, to gaze down from your velveted gallery on the mad tilting below, to see ever and anon through the yellow dust a kind, handsome face looking up at you, pale but scarcely reproachful, just before the horse-hoofs trod it down; ah! fairest Ninons and Dianas--prizes that, like the Whip at Newmarket, were always to be challenged for--you were proud when your reckless lover came to woo, with the blood of last night's favorite not dry on his blade; but what were your fatal honors compared to those of a reigning toast in the rough, ancient days? The demigods and heroes that were suitors did not stand upon trifles, and the contest often ended in the extermination of all the lady's male relatives to the third and fourth generation. People then took it quite as a matter of course--rather a credit to the family than otherwise.
Guy and I discussed, often and gravely, the relative merits of Evadne the violet-haired, Helen, Cleopatra, and a hundred others, just as, on the steps of White's, or in the smoking-room at the "Rag," men compare the points of the _débutantes_ of the season.