r a reviewer,
especially if he be young and anonymous, to tell a living writer that
his book has "no reason for existing"; but chairs of literature are
not maintained by universities that their occupants may, in relation
to living persons, exercise the functions of young anonymous
reviewers. It may indeed be doubted whether these occupants should,
except in the most guarded way, touch living persons at all.

Critically too, as well as from the point of view of manners, the
_Lectures on Translating Homer_ are open to not a few criticisms.
In the first place, the assumptions are enormous, and, in some cases
at least, demonstrably baseless. One of Mr Arnold's strongest points,
for instance, not merely against Mr Newman but against Homeric
translators generally, is concerned with the renderings of the Homeric
compound adjectives, especially the stock ones--_koruthaiolos_,
_merops_, and the rest. The originals, he is never weary of repeating,
did not strike a Greek and do not strike a Greek scholar as out of the
way; the English equivalents do so strike an English reader. Now as to
the Greeks themselves, we know nothing: they have left us no positive
information on the subject. But if (which is no doubt at least partly
true) _koruthaiolos_ and _dolichoskion_ do not strike us, who have
been familiar with Greek almost as long as we can remember, as out of
the way, is that an argument? Most of us, I suppose, at about nine or
ten years old, some no doubt a little or a good deal earlier, learnt
these words as part of the ordinary Greek that was presented to us,
just as much as _kai_ and _ara_; but if we had learnt Greek as we
learn English, beginning with quite ordinary words, would it be so? I
think not; nor would it be so if people began Greek at a later and
more critical stage of their education.

It is also true that the book is full of that exceedingly arbitrary
and unproved assertion, of that rather fanciful terminology, of those
sometimes questionable aesthetic _obiter dicta_, of which, from
first to last, Mr Arnold was so prolific. When he talks about the
mysterious "grand style," and tells us that Milton can never be
affected, we murmur, "_De gustibus!_" and add mentally, "Though
Milton is the greatest of affected writers, Milton is, after
_Comus_ at least, never anything else!" When he tells us again
that at that moment (1861) "English literature as a living
intellectual instrument ranks after the literatures of Franc