The years 1860 and 1861 mark an important stage in the development of his critical method.  He was now Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and he delivered from the professorial chair his famous lectures On Translating Homer, to which in 1862 he added his “Last Words.”  As much as anything which he ever wrote, these lectures have a chance of living and being enjoyed when we are dust.  For Homer is immortal, and he who interprets Homer to Englishmen may hope at least for a longer life than most of us.

Few are those who can still recall the graceful figure in its silken gown; the gracious address, the slightly supercilious smile, of the Milton jeune et voyageant,[5] just returned from contact with all that was best in French culture to instruct and astonish his own university; few who can still catch the cadence of the opening sentence:  “It has more than once been suggested to me that I should translate Homer”; few that heard the fine tribute of the aged scholar,[6] who, as the young lecturer closed a later discourse, murmured to himself, “The Angel ended.”

With his characteristic trick of humorous mock-humility, Arnold wrote to a friendly reviewer who praised these lectures on translating Homer:  “I am glad any influential person should call attention to the fact that there was some criticism in the three lectures; most people seem to have gathered nothing from them except that I abused F.W.  Newman, and liked English hexameters.”

Criticisms of criticism are the most melancholy reading in the world, and therefore no attempt will here be made to examine in detail the praise which in these lectures he poured upon the supreme exemplar of pure art, or the delicious ridicule with which he assailed the most respectable attempts to render Homer into English.  For the praise, let one quotation suffice—­“Homer’s grandeur is not the mixed and turbid grandeur of the great poets of the North, of the authors of Othello and Faust; it is a perfect, a lovely grandeur.  Certainly his poetry has all the energy and power of the poetry of our ruder climates; but it has, besides, the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky.”

On the ridicule, we must dwell a little more at length; for this was, in the modern slang, “a new departure” in his critical method.  At the date when he published his lectures On Translating Homer, English criticism of literature was, and for some time had been, an extremely solemn business.  Much of it had been exceedingly good, for it had been produced by Johnson and Coleridge, and De Quincey and Hazlitt.  Much had been atrociously bad, resembling all too closely Mr. Girdle’s pamphlet “in sixty-four pages, post octavo, on the character of the Nurse’s deceased husband in Romeo and Juliet, with an enquiry whether he had really been a ‘merry man’ in his lifetime, or whether it was merely his widow’s affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him."[7]