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PENELOPE AND HER SUITORS.

21

No such meeting has been held since the departure of Ulysses for Troy. As Telemachus passes to take his place there, all men remark a new majesty in his looks.

"So when the concourse to the full was grown, He lifted in his hand the steely spear, And to the council moved, but not alone, For as he walked his swift dogs followed near. Also Minerva did with grace endear His form, that all the people gazed intent And wondered, while he passed without a peer. Straight to his father's seat his course he bent, And the old men gave way in reverence as he went."

He makes his passionate protest before them all against the insufferable waste of his household by this crew of revellers, and against their own supineness in offering him no aid to dislodge them. Antinous rises to answer him, beginning, as before, with an ironical compliment—"the young orator's language is as sublime as his spirit." But the fault, he begs to assure him, lies not with the suitors, but with the queen herself. She has been playing fast and loose with her lovers, deluding them, for these three years past, with vain hopes and false promises. She had, indeed, been practising a kind of pious fraud upon them. She had set up a mighty loom, in which she wrought diligently to complete, as she professed, a winding-sheet of delicate texture for her husband's father, the aged Laertes, against the day of his death. Not until this sad task was finished, she entreated of them, let her be asked to choose a new bridegroom. To so much forbearance they had all assented; but lo! they had lately discovered that what she wrought by day she carefully