irst time (even Coleridge with much wider
reading had not co-ordinated it from this point of view) we find the
two great ancient and the three or four great modern literatures of
Europe taken synoptically, used to illustrate and explain each other,
to point out each other's defects and throw up each other's merits.
Almost for the first time, too, we have ancient literature treated
more or less like modern--neither from the merely philological point
of view, nor with reference to the stock platitudes and traditions
about it. The critic is not afraid of doctrines and general
principles--in fact, he is rather too fond of them--but his object is
anything rather than mere arid deduction and codification. He has the
aesthetic sense as thoroughly as Hazlitt and Lamb, but without the
wilfulness of either, or at least with a different kind of wilfulness
from that of either. Finally, in one of the numerous ways in which he
shows that his subject is alive to him, he mixes it up with the
queerest personalities and sudden zigzags, with all manner of
digressions and side-flings. And last of all, he has that new style of
which we spoke--a style by no means devoid of affectation and even
trick, threatening, to experienced eyes, the disease of mannerism, but
attractive in its very provocations, almost wholly original, and
calculated, at least while it retains its freshness, to drive what is
said home into the reader's mind and to stick it there.

The faults, we said, both critical and non-critical, are certainly not
lacking; and if they were not partly excused by the author's avowedly
militant position, might seem sometimes rather grave. Whatever may
have been the want of taste, and even the want of sense, in the
translation of F. W. Newman, it is almost sufficient to say that they
were neither greater nor less than might have been expected from a
person who, if the most scholarly of eccentrics, was also the most
eccentric even of English scholars. It is difficult not to think that
Mr Arnold makes too much of them and refers too frequently to them.
Such "iteration" is literally "damnable": it must be condemned as
unfair, out of place, out of taste, and even not distantly approaching
that lack of urbanity with which Mr Arnold was never tired of
reproaching his countrymen. Another translator, Mr Wright, was indeed
needlessly sensitive to Mr Arnold's strictures; but these strictures
themselves were needlessly severe. It is all very well fo