undi_ and his _Homeric Primer_, has added not a little to
our scientific knowledge of the Homeric poems,(320) by his extraordinary
mastery of the text, the result of unwearied and prolonged industry, aided
(M193) by a memory both tenacious and ready. Taking his own point of view,
moreover, anybody who wishes to have his feeling about the _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_ as delightful poetry refreshed and quickened, will find
inspiring elements in the profusion, the eager array of Homer's own lines,
the diligent exploration of aspects and bearings hitherto unthought of.
The "theo-mythology" is commonly judged fantastic, and has been compared
by sage critics to Warburton's _Divine Legation_--the same comprehensive
general reading, the same heroic industry in marshalling the particulars
of proof, the same dialectical strength of arm, and all brought to prove
an unsound proposition.(321) Yet the comprehensive reading and the
particulars of proof are by no means without an interest of their own,
whatever we may think of the proposition; and here, as in all his literary
writing distinguished from polemics, he abounds in the ethical elements.
Here perhaps more than anywhere else he impresses us by his love of beauty
in all its aspects and relations, in the human form, in landscape, in the
affections, in animals, including above all else that sense of beauty
which made his Greeks take it as one of the names for nobility in conduct.
Conington, one of the finest of scholars, then lecturing at Oxford on
Latin poets and deep in his own Virgilian studies, which afterwards bore
such admirable fruit, writes at length (Feb. 14, 1857) to say how grateful
he is to Mr. Gladstone for the care with which he has pursued into details
a view of Virgil that they hold substantially in common, and proceeds with
care and point to analyse the quality of the Roman poet's art, as some
years later he defended against Munro the questionable proposition of the
superiority in poetic style of the graceful, melodious, and pathetic
Virgil to Lucretius's mighty muse.

No field has been more industriously worked for the last forty years than
this of the relations of paganism to the historic religion that followed
it in Europe. The knowledge and the speculations into which Mr. Gladstone
was thus initiated in the sixties may now seem crude enough; but he
deserves some credit in English, though not in view of German, speculation
for an early perception of an unfamiliar regio