charge being brought; and how the inwardness of culture would make us seize, for watching and cure, the faults to which our want of an Academy inclines us, and yet prevent us from trusting to an arm of flesh, as the Puritans say, from blindly flying to this outward machinery of an` Academy in order to help ourselves. For the very same culture and free inward play of thought which shows how the Corinthian style, or the whimsies about the One Primeval Language, are generated and strengthened in the absence of an Academy, shows us, too, how little any Academy, such as we should be likely to get, would cure them. Every one who knows the characteristics of our national life, knows exactly what an English Academy would be like. One can see the happy family in one's mind's eye as distinctly as if it were already constituted. Lord Stanhope, the Dean of St. Paul's, the Bishop of Oxford,3 Lord Houghton, Mr. Gladstone, the Dean of Westminster, Mr. Froude, Mr. Henry Reeve, everything which is influential, accomplished, and distinguished; and then, some fine morning, a dissatisfaction of the public mind with this brilliant and select coterie, a flight of Corinthian leading articles, and an irruption of Mr. G. A. Sala. Clearly, this is not what will do us good. The very same faults,-the want of sensitiveness of intellectual conscience, the disbelief in

2

The late Lord Stanhope. 2 The late Dean Milman.
• The late Bishop Wilberforce.

An English Academy.

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right reason, the dislike of authority,—which have hindered our having an Academy and have worked injuriously in our literature, would also hinder us from making our Academy, if we established it, one which would really correct them.-Culture and Anarchy.

CREATIVE EPOCHS.

THE grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery; its gift lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations,-making beautiful works. with them, in short. But it must have the atmosphere, it must find itself amidst the order of ideas, in order to work freely; and these it is not so easy to command. This is why great creative epochs in literature are so rare, this is why there is so much that is unsatisfactory in the productions of many men of real genius ;-because for the creation of a master-work of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment; the creative power has, for its happy exercise, appointed elements, and those elements are not in its own control. -Essays in Criticism.

GENIUS OF HOMER.

HOMER has not only the English vigour, he has the Greek grace; and when one observes the boisterous, rollicking way, in which his English admirers, even men of genius, like the late Professor Wilson,—love to talk of Homer and his poetry, one cannot help feeling that there is no very deep community of nature between them and the object of their enthusiasm. It is all very well, my good friends,' I always imagine Homer saying to them, if he could hear them: 'you do me a great deal of honour, but somehow or other you praise me too like barbarians.' For 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.-Lectures on Translating Homer.

HOMER AND THE BIBLE.

We shall find one English book and one only, where, as in the Iliad itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible. No one could see this more clearly than Pope saw it. 'This pure and noble simplicity,' he says, 'is nowhere in such perfection as in the Scripture and Homer.' Yet even

Homer and the Bible.

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with Pope a woman is a 'fair,' a father is a 'sire,' and an old man a 'reverend sage,' and so on through all the phrases of that pseudo-Augustan, and most unbiblical, vocabulary. The Bible, however, is undoubtedly the grand mine of diction for the translator of Homer; and, if he knows how to discriminate truly between what will suit him and what will not, the Bible may afford him also invaluable lessons of style.-Lectures on Translating Homer.

HOMER AND THE ELIZABETHANS.

As eminently as Homer is plain, so eminently is the Elizabethan literature in general, and Chapman in particular, fanciful. Steeped in humours and fantasticality up to its very lips, the Elizabethan age, newly arrived at the free use of the human faculties after their long term of bondage, and delighting to exercise them freely, suffers from its own extravagance in this first exercise of them, can hardly bring itself to see an object quietly or to describe it temperately. Happily, in the translation of the Bible, the sacred character of their original inspired the translators with such respect, that they did not dare to give the rein to their own fancies in dealing with it. But, in dealing with works of profane literature, in dealing with poetical works above all, which highly stimulated them, one may say that the minds of the Elizabethan translators were too active; that they could not forbear

importing so much of their own, and this of a most peculiar and Elizabethan character, into their original, that they effaced the character of the original itself.—Lectures on Translating Homer.

HOMER, SPENSER, AND KEATS.

SPENSER'S verse is fluid and rapid, no doubt, but there are more ways than one of being fluid and .rapid, and Homer is fluid and rapid in quite another way than Spenser. Spenser's manner is no more Homeric than is the manner of the one modern inheritor of Spenser's beautiful gift; the poet, who evidently caught from Spenser his sweet and easy-slipping movement, and who has exquisitely employed it; a Spenserian genius, nay, a genius by natural endowment richer probably than even Spenser; that light which shines so unexpected and without fellow in our century, an Elizabethan born too late, the early lost and admirably gifted Keats.-Lectures on Translating Homer.

HOMER AND SCOTT.

THE poetic style of Scott is, (it becomes necessary to say so when it is proposed to 'translate Homer into the melodies of Marmion'),-it is, tried by the highest standards, a bastard epic style; and that is why, out of his own powerful hands, it has had so little success. is a less natural, and therefore a less good style, than the

It