No quarrels, perhaps, are so bitter as those about matters of taste:  hardly even is the odium theologicum, so profound as the odium aestheticum.  A man, perhaps, will more easily forgive another for disbelieving his own total depravity than for believing that Guido is a great painter or Tupper an inspiring poet.  The present dispute, therefore, tenderly personal as it is on the part of one of the pleaders, is especially interesting as showing a very decided and gratifying advance in the civilization of literary men to-day as compared with that of a century or indeed half a century ago.  If we go back still farther, matters were still worse, and we find Luther and even Milton raking the kennel for dirt dirty enough to fling at an antagonist.  But even within the memory of man, the style of the “Dunciad” was hardly obsolete in “Blackwood” and the “Quarterly.”  It is very pleasant, in the present case, to see both attack and defence conducted with so gentlemanlike a reserve,—­and the latter, which is even more surprising, with an approach to amenity.

In Mr. Newman the Professor of Poetry finds an able and wary antagonist, and one who, in point of learning, carries heavier metal than himself.  The dispute turns partly on the character of Homer’s poetry, partly on the true method of translation, (especially Homeric translation,) and partly on the particular merits of Mr. Newman’s attempt as compared with those of others.  Of course, many side-topics are incidentally touched upon, among others, the English hexameter, Mr. Newman’s objections to which are particularly worthy of attention.

Mr. Newman instantly sees and strikes at the weak point of his adversary’s argument.  “You appeal to scholars,” he says in substance; “you admit that I am one; now you don’t like my choice of words or metre; I do; who, then, shall decide?  Why, the public, of course, which is the court of last appeal in such cases.”  It appears to us, that, on most of the points at issue, the truth lies somewhere between the two disputants.  We do not think that Mr. Newman has made out his case that Homer was antiquated, quaint, and even grotesque to the Greeks themselves because his cast of thought and his language were archaic, or strange to them because he wrote in a dialect almost as different from Attic as Scotch from English.  The Bible is as far from us in language and in the Orientalism of its thought and expression as Homer was from them; yet we are so familiar with it that it produces on us no impression of being antiquated or quaint, seldom of being grotesque, and what is still more to the purpose, produces that impression as little on illiterate persons to whom many of the words are incomprehensible.  So, too, it seems to us, no part of Burns is alien to a man whose mother-tongue is English, in the same sense that some parts of Beranger are; because Burns, though a North Briton, was still a Briton, as Homer, though an Ionian, was still a Greek.  We think he does