ct 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]

But, whether good or bad, criticism had been solemn. Even Arnold's first
performances in the art had been as grave as Burke or Wordsworth. But in
his lectures _On Translating Homer_ he added a new resource t