As to his style, his manner or movement:  to summarize what Mathew Arnold says of it (the best I can do):  it is as direct and rapid as Scott’s; as lucid as Wordsworth’s could be; but noble like Shakespeare’s or Milton’s.  There is no Dantesque periphrasis, nor Miltonian agnostic struggle and inversion; but he calls spades, spades, and moves on to the next thing swiftly, clearly, and yet with exultation. (Yet there is retardation often by long similes.) And he either made a language for himself, or found one ready to his hand, as resonant and sonorous as the loll and slap of billows in the hollow caverns of the sea.  As his lines swing in and roll and crash, they swell the soul in you, and you hear and grow great on the rhythm of the eternal.  This though we really, I suppose, are quite uncertain as to the pronunciation.  But give the vowels merely a plain English value, certain to be wrong, and you still have grand music.  Perhaps some of you have read Mathew Arnold’s great essay On Translating Homer, and know the arguments wherewith wise Matthew exalts him.  A Mr. Newman had translated him so as considerably to out-Bottom Bottom; and Arnold took up the cudgels—­to some effect.  Newman had treated him as a barbarian, a primitive; Arnold argued that it was Homer, on the contrary, who might have so looked on us.  There is, however, perhaps something to be said on Mr. Newman’s side.  Homer’s huge and age-long fame, and his extraordinary virtues, were quite capable of blinding even a great critic to certain things about him which I shall, with great timidity, designate imperfections:  therein following De Quincey, who read Greek from early childhood as easily as English, and who, as a critic, saw things sometimes. Bonus dormitat Homerus, says Horace; like the elder Gobbo, he “something smacked.”  He was the product of a great creative force; which did not however work in a great literary age:  and all I am going to say is merely a bearing out of this.

First there is his poverty of epithets.  He repeats the same ones over and over again.  He can hardly mention Hector without calling him megas koruthaiolos Hector,—­“great glittering-helmeted Hector”; or (in the genitive) Hectoros hippodamoio—­ “of Hector the tamer of war-steeds.”  Over and over again we have anax andron Agamemnon; or “swift-footed Achilles.”  Over and over again is the sea poluphloisbois-terous, as if he could say nothing new about it.  Having discovered one resounding phrase that fits nicely into the hexameter, he seems to have been just content with the splendor of sound, and unwilling so to stir his imagination as to flash some new revelation on it.  As if Hamlet should never be mentioned in the play, without some such epithet as “the hesitating Dane."......  But think how the Myriad-minded One positively tumbles over himself in hurling and fountaining up new revelatory figures and epithets about everything:  how he could not afford to