Note 6 — LETTER IX.

You little know how much is implied in the two conditions of boys’ education that I gave you in my last letter,—that they shall all learn either to ride or sail; nor by what constancy of law the power of highest discipline and honour is vested by Nature in the two chivalries—of the Horse and the Wave. Both are significative of the right command of man over his own passions; but they teach, farther, the strange mystery of relation that exists between his soul and the wild natural elements on the one hand, and the wild lower animals on the other. The sea-riding gave their chief strength of temper to the Athenian, Norman, Pisan, and Venetian,—masters of the arts of the world: but the gentleness of chivalry, properly so called, depends on the recognition of the order and awe of lower and loftier animal-life, first clearly taught in the myth of Chiron, and in his bringing up of Jason, Æsculapius, and Achilles, but most perfectly by Homer in the fable of the horses of Achilles, and the part assigned to them, in relation to the death of his friend, and in prophecy of his own. There is, perhaps, in all the ‘Iliad’ nothing more deep in significance—there is nothing in all literature more perfect in human tenderness, and honour for the mystery of inferior life,6 than the verses that describe the sorrow of the divine horses at the death of Patroclus, and the comfort given them by the greatest of the gods. You shall read Pope’s translation; it does not give you the manner of the original, but it entirely gives you the passion:—