ry "Last Words," appeared in 1861-62, and _On the Study of
Celtic Literature_, which appeared at the termination of his tenure in
1867. It may be questioned whether he ever did anything of more
influence than these books, this being due partly to the fashion of
their publication--which, in the latter case at least, applied the
triple shock of lecture at the greatest of English literary centres,
of magazine article, and of book--and partly to the fact that they
were about subjects in which a real or a factitious, a direct or an
indirect, interest was taken by almost every one. Every educated
person knew and cared something (or at least would not have liked to
be supposed not to care and know something) about Homer; very few
educated persons knew anything about Celtic literature. But in these
later lectures he put in a more popular and provocative form than that
of his _French Eton_ (see next chapter) that mixture of literary,
political, social, and miscellaneous critique of his countrymen for
which he was thenceforward best known; and which, if it brought down
some hard knocks from his adversaries, and perhaps was not altogether
a healthy mixture for himself, could at least not be charged by any
reasonable person with lack of piquancy and actuality.

Both books are, and, despite some drawbacks of personal and ephemeral
allusion, always will be, interesting; and both had, perhaps even more
than the _Essays in Criticism_ themselves, a stimulating effect
upon English men of letters which can hardly be overvalued. It may
indeed be said without paradox that they owe not a little of their
value to their faults; but they owe a great deal more to their merits.

The faults are apparent enough even in the first series, which falls
to be noticed in this chapter; yet it is really difficult to say when
a more important book of English criticism had appeared. Dryden's
_Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, Johnson's _Lives_ at their frequent best,
Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_, are greater things; but hardly the
best of them was in its day more "important for _us_." To read even
the best of that immediately preceding criticism of which something
has been said above--nay, even to recur to Coleridge and Hazlitt and
Lamb--and then to take up _On Translating Homer_, is to pass to a
critic with a far fuller equipment, with a new method, with a style of
his own, and with an almost entirely novel conception of the whole art
of criticism. For the f