him, walk him off.  I grant the rapidity of Dante.  It is amazing; and we may yield him all the credit for choosing (it was his genius that chose it) a subject which allowed of the very highest rapidity; since Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, though they differ in other respects, have this in common, that they are populous and the inhabitants of each so compendiously shepherded together that the visitor can turn from one person to another without loss of time.  But Homer does not escort us around a menagerie in which we can move expeditiously from one cage to another.  He proposes at least, both in the “Iliad” and in the “Odyssey,” to unfold a story; and he seems to unfold it so artlessly that we linger on the most pedestrian intervals while he tells us, for example, what the heroes ate and how they cooked it.  A modern writer would serve us a far better dinner.  Homer brings us to his with our appetite all the keener for having waited and watched the spitting and roasting.

I would point out to you what art this genius conceals; how cunning is this apparent simplicity:  and for this purpose let me take Homer at the extreme of his difficulty—­when he has to describe a long sea-voyage.

Some years ago, in his last Oxford lectures, Mr Froude lamented that no poet in this country had arisen to write a national epic of the great Elizabethan seamen, to culminate (I suppose) as his History culminated, in the defeat of the Armada:  and one of our younger poets; Mr Alfred Noyes, acting on this hint has since given us an epic poem on “Drake,” in twelve books.  But Froude probably overlooked, as Mr Noyes has not overcome, this difficulty of the flat interval which, while ever the bugbear of Epic, is magnified tenfold when our action takes place on the sea.  For whereas the verse should be rapid and the high moments frequent, the business of seafaring is undeniably monotonous, as the intervals between port and port, sea-fight and sea-fight, must be long and lazy.  Matters move more briskly in an occasional gale; but even a gale lasts, and must be ridden out; and the process of riding to a gale of wind:—­

     For ever climbing up the climbing wave

—­your ship taking one wave much as she takes another—­is in its nature monotonous.  Nay, you have only to read Falconer’s “Shipwreck” to discover how much of dulness may lie enwrapped, to discharge itself, even in a first-class tempest.  Courses, reckonings, trimmings of canvas—­these occur in real life and amuse the simple mariner at the time.  But to the reader, if he be a landsman, their repetition in narrative may easily become intolerable; and when we get down to the ‘trades,’ even the seaman sets his sail for a long spell of weather and goes to sleep.  In short you cannot upon the wide Atlantic push action and reaction to and fro as upon the plains of windy Troy:  nor could any but a superhuman genius make sustained poetry (say) out of Nelson’s untiring pursuit of Villeneuve, which none the less was one of the most heroic feats in history.