ON GIANTS, OGRES, AND CYCLOPS.

BY LEIGH HUNT.

It would be difficult to find an early national history without a giant in it. Anything great in its effects, and supposed not to be very tenderhearted, was a giant. A violent set of neighbours were giants. An opposer of the gods was a giant, and threw mountains at them, instead of sceptical essays. Evil genii were gigantic. The same Persian word came to signify a giant, a devil, and a magician. An older word, in the Persian language, meaning a giant, gave its name to the ancient dynasty of the Caianides. Kings, in ancient times, when physical more than moral dignity was in request, were sometimes chosen on account of their stature. Agamemnon is represented as taller by the head and shoulders than any man in his army; and probably it was as much on account of his height as his other supremacy that he was called Anax-Andron, King of Men. An etymologist would even see in the word Anar a resemblance to the Anakites of Scripture. It is remarkable that Virgil, in his Elysium, has given the old poet Musæus a similar superiority over his brethren; as if every kind of power in the early ages was associated with that of body. Moral enormity was naturally typified by physical. "It may be observed," says Mr. Hole, " that a giant, in Arabic or Persian fables, is commonly a negro or infidel Indian, as he is in our old romances a Saracen Paynim, a votary of Mahound and Termagaunt." "Were the negroes authors," he pleasantly adds, " they would probably characterise their giants by whiskers and turbans; or by hats, wigs, and a pale complexion." *

In like manner, if the English wrote allegorical story-books now-a-days, the oppressive lord or magistrate would be a giant. Fierce upholders of the old game-laws would be monsters of the woods, that devoured a man if he dared to touch one of their rabbits. "In books of chivalry," says Bishop Hurd," the giants were oppressive feudal lords; and every lord was to be met with, like the giant, in his stronghold or castle. Their dependants of the lower form, who imitated the violence of their superiors, and had not their castles, but their lurking-places, were the savages of romance. The greater lord was called a giant, for his power; the less, a savage, for his brutality. All this is shadowed out of the Gothic tales, and sometimes expressed in plain words. The objects of the knight's vengeance go indeed by the various names of giants, paynims, Saracens and savages. But of what family they all are, is clearly seen from the poet's description:

What, mister wight, quoth he, and how far hence

Is he, that doth to travellers such harmes ?

He is, said he, a man of great defence,
Expert in battell and in deedes of armes;
And more emboldened by the wicked charmes
With which his daughter doth him still support:
Having great lordships got and goodly farmes
Through strong oppression of his powre extort;

By which he still them holds, and keeps with strong effort.

* Remarks on the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, p. 80.

And dayly he his wrongs encreaseth more,
For never wight he lets to pass that waye
Over his bridge, albee he rich or poore,
But he him makes his passage-penny paye:
Else he doth hold him backe or beate awaye.
Thereto he hath a groom of evil guise,
Whose scalp is bare, that bondage doth bewraye,
Which pols and pils the poore in piteous wise,
But he himself upon the rich doth tyrannise.'

"Here," says the Bishop, we have the great oppressive baron very graphically set forth. And the groom of evil guise is as plainly the baron's vassal. The romancers, we see, took no great liberty with these respectable personages, when they called the one a giant, and the other

a savage.

That men of gigantic stature have existed here and there, we have had testimony in our own days. Some of them, probably not the tallest, have been strong. The others are weak and ill-formed, like children that have outgrown their strength. Whether giants ever existed as a body is still a question. The Patagonians of Commodore Byron have come down to a reasonable stature; and the bones that used to be exhibited as proofs undeniable of enormous men, turn out to be those of the mammoth and the elephant. But this is the prose of gigantology. In poetry they are still alive and stalking.

The earliest giants were monstrous as well as huge. Those that warred with the gods, and heaped Ossa upon Pelion, had a multitude of heads and arms, with serpents instead of legs. Typhon, the evil principle, the dreadful wind (still known in the East under the same name, the Tifoon), had dragons' instead of human heads; and out of each of them threw the shriek of a different animal. Enceladus was thrust under Mount Etna, from which he still vomits fire and smoke; and when he turns his side, there is an earthquake. Otus and Ephialtes grew nine inches a month, and at nine years old made their campaign against the gods. Now and then a giant undertook to be more courtly and pious. When Juno, Neptune, and Minerva conspired to dethrone Jupiter, Briareus went up into Heaven, and seating himself on his right hand, looked so very shocking, that the deities were fain to desist.

There is a confusion of the giants with the Titans; but their wars were different. Those of the Titans were against Coelus and Saturn; the giants warred against Jupiter. They were also of a different nature, the Titans being of proper celestial origin, whereas the birth of the giants was as monstrous as their shapes. As to the great stature of the Titans, all the gods were gigantic. It was only in their visits to earth that they accommodated themselves to human size, and then not in their wars. One of the noblest uses ever made of this association of bodily size with divine power is in " Paradise Lost," where Milton, in one of those passages in which his theology is as weak and perplexed as his verse is powerful, makes Abdiel say to the leader of the infernal armies,"Fool! not to think how vain

Against the Omnipotent to rise in arms;

Who out of smallest things could, without end,
Have raised incessant armies to defeat

Todd's Spenser, vol. vi. p. 7.

Thy folly; or with solitary hand
Reaching beyond all limit, at one blow,

Unaided, could have finished thee, and whelm'd
Thy legions under darkness."

"Solitary hand," says Bishop Newton, " means his single hand." Oh no! it is much finer than that. It means his hand, visibly alone,— with nothing round about it,—solitary in the great space of existence. It stretches out into the ether, dashing, at one blow, a great host into nothing; then draws back into Heaven, and there is a silence as if existence itself were annihilated.

He has one eye,

The Cyclops is a variety of the giant monstrous. and is a man-eater. Mr. Bryant, who, in his "Elements of Ancient Mythology," amidst a heap of wild and gratuitous assumptions, has some ingenious conjectures, is of opinion that a Cyclops was a watchtower, with a round window in it, showing a light; and that by the natural progress of fable, the tower became a man. If the light, however, was for good purposes, the charge of man-eating is against the opinion. The Cyclopes, a real people, who left the old massy specimens of architecture called after their name, are said to have been in the habit of carrying shields with an eye painted on them, or wore visors with a hole to see through. But these conjectures are not necessary to our treatise. The proper, huge, cannibal giant, the Fee-faw-fum of antiquity, is our monster. Homer, who wandered about the world, and took marvels as they came, has painted him in all his cruelty. Theocritus, writing pastorals at the court of Ptolemy, and more of a "sweet Signior," found out a refinement for him, which, to say the truth, is superior to jesting, and has touched a chord which the inventor of the character of Hector would have admired. He made Polyphemus in love; and we are sorry for the monster, and wish Galatea to treat him with as much tenderness as is compatible with her terrors.* His discovery of his forlorn condition, his fear that his senses are forsaking him, and his eagerness to suppose that he is not altogether alien to humanity, because the village girls, when he speaks to them from his mountain at night-time, laugh at him, render him no longer a monstrosity odious, but a difference pitiable.†

There is a Polyphemus in the story of "Sindbad" so like Homer's, that the ingenious author of the "Remarks on the Arabian Nights' Entertainments" pronounces it to be copied from him. Homer, however, might have copied it from the Orientals. He might have heard it from Eastern traders, granting it was unknown to the Greeks before. The wanderings of Ulysses imply a compilation of wonders from all parts of the world. The Greeks, except in this instance, appear to have had

Those who wish to know how music can express a giant's misery, contrasted with the happiness of two innocent lovers, should hear the serenata of" Acis and Galatea," by Handel, the giant of the orchestra.

("Where giant Handel stands,

Arm'd, like Briareus, with his hundred hands."-POPE.)

The terrible intonations of Polyphemus in his despair, with those lovely unweeting strains of the happy pair immediately issuing out upon them, "Ere I forsake my love," &c., offer perhaps the finest direct piece of contrast in the whole circle of music.

Theocritus, Idyll, XI., v. 72.

no idea of a nation of giants. Even Polyphemus they mixed up with their mythology, making him a son of Neptune. On the other hand, the grandiosity of the Orientals supplied them with giants in abundance, and Sir John Mandeville had no need, as Mr. Hole imagines, to go to Virgil and Ovid for his descriptions of huge monsters, eating men as they go, "all raw and all quicke.'

Ariosto, in the seventeenth book of his great poem, has a Polyphemus with two projecting bones, instead of eyes, of the colour of fungus. This is very ghastly. He calls him an orco, that is to say, an ogre. Ogre, whether derived from the Latin orcus, or from Oigour (a tribe of Tartars), or Hongrois, or Hungarian *, is a man-eater; and orco appears to be the same, though not confined to the man-monster. The same poet, in his rifacimento of the story of Andromeda (canto 10), calls the fish an orc; and the word is used in a like sense in our own elder poetry. Ariosto's Polyphemus (for he gives him a cavern, sheep, &c., exactly like those of the old Cyclops) has no sight at all with those horrible goggles of his. An exquisite sense of smelling supplies the want of it; and he comes running upon his prey, dipping his nose towards the ground.

"Mentre aspettiamo, in gran piacer sedendo,

Che da caccia ritorni il signor nostro,
Vedemmo l'orco a noi venir correndo
Lungo il lito del mar, terribil mostro.
Dio vi guardi, signor, che 'l viso orrendo
De l'orco a gli occhi mai vi sia dimostro.
Meglio e per fama aver notizia d'esso,
Ch' andargli, si che lo veggiate, appresso.
"Non si puo compartir quanto sia lungo,
Si smisuratamente è tutto grosso.
In luogo d'occhi, di color di fungo
Sotto la fronte ha due coccole d'osso.
Verso noi vien, come vi dico, lungo
Il lito : e par ch'un monticel sia mosso.
Mostra le zanne fuor, come fa il porco:
Ha lungo il naso, e'l sen bavoso e sporco.

"Correndo viene, e'l muso a guisa porta
Che'l braccio suol, quando entra in su la traccia.
Tutti che lo veggiam, con faccia smorta
In fugo andiamo ove il timor ne caccia.
Poco il veder lui cieco ne conforta;
Quando fiutando sol par che piu faccia,
Ch'altri non fa ch 'abbia odorato e lume:
E bisogno al fuggire eran le piume."

While thus we sat, prepared for mirth and glee,
Waiting the king's appearance from the chase,
Suddenly, to our horror, by the sea,

We saw the ogre coming towards the place.
God keep you, Sir, in his benignity,
From setting eyes on such a dreadful face!
Better, by far, of such things to be told,
Than see a sight to make a man turn old.

* See Fairy Mythology, vol. ii.

I cannot tell you his immeasured size,
So huge he was, and of a bulk throughout.
Upon his horrid front, instead of eyes,

Two bony roundels, fungus-hued, stuck out.
Thus, like the only thing 'twixt earth and skies,
He came along; and under his brute snout
Tusks he put forth, bared like the boar's in wrath;
And his huge breast was filthy with a froth.
Running he comes, projecting towards the ground
His loathly muzzle, dog-like, on the scent.
With ashy faces we arise, and bound,
Fast as we can, before the dire intent.

Small comfort to us was his blindness found;

Since with his smelling only as he bent,

More sure he seem'd than creatures that have sight;
And wings alone could match him for a flight.

The poverty-stricken propriety of Mr. Hoole regarded these circumstances as puerilities." He ventured to turn Ariosto's wine into water, and then judged him in his unhappy sobriety. Mr. Hoole was not man enough to play the child with a great southern genius. Ariosto's poem is a microcosm, which sees fair play to all the circles of imagination, at least to all such as are common to men in their ordinary state; and he did not omit those that include childhood, and that, in some measure, are never forgotten by us. This, literally construed, is in high epic taste, as much so as the homely similies of the Iliad and the Odyssey. We should be thankful, for our parts, to an epic poet who could manage to introduce the big-headed and bushy-haired ogres of our own story-books, with the little ogres, their children, all with crowns on their heads. We sympathise with the hand of the diminutive "giganticide," who felt them as they lay in their grim slumber, all in a row. Was this, by the way, a satire on royalty? It is an involuntary one. The giant Gargantua, in Rabelais, who ate three men in a salad, was a king.

Several of Spenser's allegorical personages are giants. The allegory is incidental, and helps to vary the individual character; but otherwise the bodily pictures are complete specimens of the giants of chivalry. One of them is Disdain,

"Who did disdain

To be so called, and whoso did him call."
Of another giant, of the same name, he tells us that
"His lookes were dreadfull, and his fiery eies,
Like two great beacons, glared bright and wide,
Glauncing askew, as if his enemies

He scorned in his overweening pryde;

And stalking stately, like a crane, did stryde
At every step upon the tiptoes hie;
And all the way he went, on every syde
He gaz'd about, and stared horriblie,

As if he with his looks would all men terrifie.
"He wore no armour, ne for none did care,
As no whit dreading any living wight;
But in a jacket, quilted richly rare

Upon checklaton*, he was strangely dight,

* Checklatoun (Fr. ciclatoun) is supposed to be intended by Spenser for cloth of gold.