e": "Why should not we
also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Pope had said, in his
"Essay on Criticism,"[16] "follow Nature," and in order to follow Nature,
learn the rules and study the ancients, particularly Homer. "Nature and
Homer were the same." Contrariwise, Young says: "The less we copy the
renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more. . .
Learning . . . is a great lover of rules and boaster of famed
examples . . . and sets rigid bounds to that liberty to which genius
often owes its supreme glory. . . Born _originals_, how comes it to pass
that we die _copies_?. . . Let not great examples or authorities
browbeat thy reason into too great a diffidence of thyself. . . While
the true genius is crossing all public roads into fresh untrodden ground;
he [the imitative writer], up to the knees in antiquity, is treading the
sacred footsteps of great examples with the blind veneration of a bigot
saluting the sacred toe." Young asserts that Shakspere is equal in
greatness to the ancients: regrets that Pope did not employ blank verse
in his translation of Homer, and calls Addison's "Cato" "a piece of
statuary."

Robert Wood, who visited and described the ruins of Balbec and Palmrya,
took his Iliad to the Troad and read it on the spot. He sailed in the
track of Menelaus and the wandering Ulysses; and his acquaintance with
Eastern scenery and life helped to substitute a fresher apprehension of
Homer for the somewhat conventional conception that had prevailed through
the classical period. What most forcibly struck Herder and Goethe in
Wood's essay was the emphasis laid upon the simple, unlettered, and even
barbaric state of society in the heroic age: and upon the primitive and
popular character (_Urspruenglichkeit, Volksthuemlichkeit_) of the Homeric
poems.[17] This view of Homer, as essentially a minstrel or
ballad-maker, has been carried so far in Professor Newman's translations
as to provoke remonstrance from Matthew Arnold, who insists upon Homer's
"nobility" and "grand style."[18] But with whatever exaggeration it may
have latterly been held, it was wholesomely corrective and stimulating
when propounded in 1768.

Though the final arrival of German romanticism, in its fullness, was
postponed too late to modify the English movement, before the latter had
spent its first strength, yet the prelude was heard in England and found
an echo there. In 1792 Walter Scott was a young lawyer at Edinburgh