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The Adventures of Ulysses Adventures of Ulysses The The Adventures of Ulysses Adventures The Adventures of Ulysses by Charles Lamb ■ Charles Lamb P ISBN 0 9512899 1 8 P ARCHIVE Charles Lamb The Adventures of Ulysses edited by John Cooke P First published 1808 First published in John Cooke’s edition 1892 First published in this edition 1992 Split Pea Press 57 Morningside Drive Edinburgh Scotland EH10 5NF Split Pea Press 1992 All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the copyright holders. The publisher acknowledges subsidy from the Carnegie Trust towards publication of this volume. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: Lamb, Charles Adventures of Ulysses I. Title II. Cooke, John 823.7 ISBN 0 9512899 1 8 Printed and bound in the UK by Page Bros., Norwich Contents Preface v Introduction vii Introduction by Charles Lamb xix The Adventures of Ulysses 1 Notes 111 Index of Proper Names 151 Textual Apparatus 155 Afterword 157 Bibliography 167 PREFACE NONE, except those who have carefully considered the subject, can rightly estimate the difficulty of selecting suitable English prose books for the younger children in our schools. There are many books written in recent years well suited for class work; but they are practically prohibited, owing to copyright, the high price of publica- tion, and the form in which they are necessarily issued. Most of the children’s books, of an earlier date, can hardly be said to belong to literature. The Adventures of Ulysses, though not so well known as it ought to be, has held its position, and I have long desired to see it introduced into school use. It gave me, therefore, no little pleasure, when the present publishers placed it in my hands to be issued as one of their Intermediate School Series. Of its suitability as such, there can be no doubt. It deals with what has well been called “the current coin of the world’s intercourse;” it is written by one of the greatest masters of English prose; and it was published specially for children. It appeals fully to the fancy and imagination, faculties which in youth are too often neglected, but which, when rightly cultivated, are the most fertile fields for true and lasting educational results. I have taken an editor’s liberty with the punctuation, for the purpose of giving more ease to the text, which Lamb’s too frequent use of the colon rendered in many places heavy and involved. In no case have I made a change where the sense could be considered to suffer. I have made also a very few slight alterations which the demands of a school text rendered necessary. The quotations from Chapman will clearly show how close vi Preface Lamb kept to his translation of the Odyssey, thus giving a quaint charm and old-world air to his prose. The few will, doubtless, consider I have erred in giving too great fulness to the Notes; but it is done from the judgment bought by experience of what the many will require. J.C. INTRODUCTION THE writer of this book was Charles Lamb. He was born in 1775, in one of the quaint courts of the group of buildings belonging to the lawyers in London, known as the Temple. When a child of seven he was sent to Christ’s Hospital, where the boys have to dress in long dark-blue coats, yellow stockings, and shoes, and go hatless, after the fashion of the time of Edward VI., who founded that school. When Lamb grew up he became a clerk, but he soon took to writing books. His sister was able to assist him, and with her he wrote several for children, as, Tales from Shakespere, and Poetry for Children. By himself he wrote, in the year 1808, this book, The Adventures of Ulysses, whose story is one of the oldest and best tales in the world. Lamb was very fond of our old English literature, and he wrote very clever essays on the plays written at the time of Queen Elizabeth. He wrote also many essays about himself, and the London world in which he lived and moved. They are so beautifully and truthfully told, that we know more about him than almost any other writer; and he is, in consequence, one of the most loved of all those who have made us wiser, happier, and better by their books. Homer, who is generally considered the writer of the book from which the Adventures of Ulysses is taken, is called the “Prince of Poets,” because he is the greatest epic poet—that is, writer about heroes, wars, and adven- tures—that ever lived. He lived in Greece, but so long ago that no one can tell exactly when, but probably about one thousand years before Christ was born. The place of birth too is not known, but he was so celebrated viii Introduction that many cities contended for the honour of having him as their citizen. Some say he was blind; but he could not always have been so. A blind man could never have sung of the sea and its foaming waves; of the beautiful scenery of rocky shores and sea-girt islands; of the sky, the fields, and the woods, unless he at one time had good powers of sight. His occupation was that of a wandering minstrel which was then considered a very honourable calling, and continued to be for very many centuries afterwards all over Europe. The greatest respect was shown to these minstrels. Kings and princes and other important persons gave them welcome, and listened as they sang of the deeds of great men, whether describing those of their ancestors, their relatives, or their own; and they showed their pleasure by giving presents of money or costly gifts. We owe a great deal of our knowledge of history and men to these singers. They put into verse the great deeds of heroes in wars, sieges, battles, and adventures, and they were handed down by word of mouth until someone put them into writing. Homer’s poems were composed at a time in which there was, perhaps, no writing, or very little; but the singers had good memories, and were practised in the art of learning by rote. We may safely assume that much of the great stories told by Homer existed before his time, but not in the beautiful form in which we have it from him. Just as a painter takes the colours scattered on his palette, and works them into a picture on his canvas, or a woman the many-coloured threads of silk from her basket, and produces a beautiful piece of needlework, so Homer took the mixed tales of gods, heroes, travel, battle, and war, and by the exercise of his great powers of language, Introduction ix fancy, and imagination, weaved them into the greatest poem ever written. His work is all the more wonderful since he had no model to follow; and although he had afterwards many imitators none have ever surpassed, or perhaps even equalled him. His knowledge of human nature was so great, that the best men in all ages have been glad to learn wisdom from him. In Greece boys learned his poems at school; many men could boast of knowing his poems by heart, and wherever a Greek went, he carried a love and reverence of the great poet with him. The ancients long after he was dead had such reverence for him, that they held festivals in his honour, raised temples and altars to him, offered sacrifices, and worshipped him as a god. The great charm in Homer lies in the artless and simple way in which he relates his story, and describes the varying incidents in the lives of his heroes. But his poems are chiefly valuable to us for the important lessons we learn of the manners, cus- toms, and mode of life of the ancient Greeks, and the social conditions under which they lived. When he described all these, and sang of battles, sieges, deeds of arms, and of sacrifices to the gods, the people under- stood him because it related to their every-day life, and not to a time long gone by. Homer’s two great poems are the Iliad, so called because it treats of the great siege of Ilios or Troy; and the Odyssey, because it tells of the wanderings, or adventures of Odysseus or Ulysses, the name by which he is best known. These two poems are divided into twenty-four books, being the same number as the let- ters of the Greek alphabet. The world as known to the ancient Greeks formed but a very small portion of the world as known to us. They knew the rocky shores, x Introduction promontories, and islands of their own country, the coast of Asia Minor, the shores of Egypt, and the south of Italy, round which Homer leads Ulysses in his wan- derings. They peopled strange lands with giants, mon- sters, and cannibals, and located the gods whom they worshipped in distant mountains, islands, woods, and caves. Their notion of the world was that it was flat; and that far beyond all known countries it was bounded by a great sea river called Oceanus, across which the souls of the dead passed and for ever dwelt in gloomy and misty regions, shrouded from the sweet light of heaven. The living could not cross this ocean and return; but by the interference of a goddess Ulysses was given this privilege, as Homer describes.
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