love of personal adornment which befits his character, he wears a spotted leopard's hide upon his shoulders. Tennyson's portrait of him, though in a different scene, is thoroughly Homeric—
"White-breasted like a star,
Fronting the dawn he moved; a leopard's skin
Drooped from his shoulder, but his sunny hair
Clustered about his temples like a god's"
Advancing with long strides in the space between the armies, he challenges the leaders of the Greeks, one and all, to meet him singly in mortal combat. Menelaus hears the boast. "Like a hungry lion springing on his prey," he leaps full-armed from his chariot, exulting in the thought that now at last his personal vengeance shall be gratified. But conscience makes a coward of Paris. He starts back—"as a man that sees a serpent in his path"—the godlike visage grows pale, the knees tremble, and the Trojan champion draws back under the shelter of his friends from the gallant hero whom he has so bitterly wronged. The Roman historian Livy—a poet in prose—had surely this passage in his mind when he described Sextus Tarquinius, the dishonourer of Lucretia, quailing, as no Roman of his blood and rank would otherwise have quailed, when young Valerius dashes out from the Roman lines to engage him. The moral teaching of the heathen poet on such points is far higher than that of the medieval romancers with whom he has so many points in common. Sir Tristram of Lyonnois has no such scruples of conscience in meeting King Mark. Lancelot, indeed, will not fight with Arthur; but the very nobility of character with which the unknown author of that striking impersonation has endowed him is in itself the highest
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