awakened sense of the responsibilities of his position, he uses language, in addressing his mother, which to our ears has a sound of harshness and reproach. He bids her not presume to set limits to the inspiration of the bard—the noblest theme is ever the best. Here minds her that woman's kingdom is the loom and the distaff, and that the rule over men in his father's house now belongs to him. Viewed with reference to the tone of the age as regarded the duties of women,—compared with the parting charge of Hector in the Iliad to the wife he loved so tenderly, and even with a higher example in Scripture,—there is nothing start-ling or repulsive in such language from a son to his mother. To the young prince in his new mood, while the counsels of Minerva were yet ringing in his ears, the absence and the sufferings of his father might well seem the only theme on which he could endure to hear the minstrel descant; it was of this, he feels, that he needed to be continually reminded. And if hitherto he has allowed this riotous company to assume that, in the absence of Ulysses, the government of his house has rested in the weak hands of a woman, it shall be so no longer. He will take his father's place.
The mother sees the change in her son's temper with some surprise—we may suppose, with somewhat mingled feelings of approval and mortification. The boy has grown into a man on the sudden. The poet gives us but a single word as any clue to the effect upon Penelope of this evidently unaccustomed out-burst of self-assertion on the part of Telemachus. "Astonished," he says, she withdraws at once to her
