taken by almost every one.  Every educated person knew and cared something (or at least would not have liked to be supposed not to care and know something) about Homer; very few educated persons knew anything about Celtic literature.  But in these later lectures he put in a more popular and provocative form than that of his French Eton (see next chapter) that mixture of literary, political, social, and miscellaneous critique of his countrymen for which he was thenceforward best known; and which, if it brought down some hard knocks from his adversaries, and perhaps was not altogether a healthy mixture for himself, could at least not be charged by any reasonable person with lack of piquancy and actuality.

Both books are, and, despite some drawbacks of personal and ephemeral allusion, always will be, interesting; and both had, perhaps even more than the Essays in Criticism themselves, a stimulating effect upon English men of letters which can hardly be overvalued.  It may indeed be said without paradox that they owe not a little of their value to their faults; but they owe a great deal more to their merits.

The faults are apparent enough even in the first series, which falls to be noticed in this chapter; yet it is really difficult to say when a more important book of English criticism had appeared.  Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Johnson’s Lives at their frequent best, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, are greater things; but hardly the best of them was in its day more “important for us.”  To read even the best of that immediately preceding criticism of which something has been said above—­nay, even to recur to Coleridge and Hazlitt and Lamb—­and then to take up On Translating Homer, is to pass to a critic with a far fuller equipment, with a new method, with a style of his own, and with an almost entirely novel conception of the whole art of criticism.  For the first time (even Coleridge with much wider reading had not co-ordinated it from this point of view) we find the two great ancient and the three or four great modern literatures of Europe taken synoptically, used to illustrate and explain each other, to point out each other’s defects and throw up each other’s merits.  Almost for the first time, too, we have ancient literature treated more or less like modern—­neither from the merely philological point of view, nor with reference to the stock platitudes and traditions about it.  The critic is not afraid of doctrines and general principles—­in fact, he is rather too fond of them—­but his object is anything rather than mere arid deduction and codification.  He has the aesthetic sense as thoroughly as Hazlitt and Lamb, but without the wilfulness of either, or at least with a different kind of wilfulness from that of either.  Finally, in one of the numerous ways in which he shows that his subject is alive to him, he mixes it up with the queerest personalities and sudden zigzags, with all manner of digressions and side-flings.  And last of all, he has that new style of which we spoke—­a style by no means devoid of affectation and even trick, threatening, to experienced eyes, the disease of mannerism, but attractive in its very provocations, almost wholly original, and calculated, at least while it retains its freshness, to drive what is said home into the reader’s mind and to stick it there.