in devotional literature.

In another and very different field of poetry also he greatly
excelled. He was an admirable example of that highly finished and
fastidious classical scholarship which is, or was, the pride of our
great public schools, and he took great pleasure in translations from
the classics. He translated into verse the 'Agamemnon' of AEschylus,
and the 'Bacchanals' of Euripides, and also a great number of small
and much less known poems. He held the professorship of poetry at
Oxford from 1821 to 1831, and as his lectures, according to the custom
which then prevailed, were delivered in Latin, he had the happy
thought of diversifying them by English metrical translations of the
different poems he treated. They range over a wide field of obscure
Greek poets, as well as of epitaphs, votive inscriptions, and
inscriptions relating to the fine arts, and in addition to these there
are translations from Sanscrit poetry--a branch of knowledge which was
then very little cultivated, and to which Milman was greatly
attracted. These poems the author published in 1865, but the lectures
in which they were produced he committed to the flames. They had, in
his opinion, lost their value through the subsequent publication of
the works on the history of Greek literature by Bode, Ulrici, Otfried
Mueller, and Mure.

In prose his pen was exceedingly active. In 1820 he began his long
connection with the 'Quarterly Review,' which continued, with
occasional intervals, through more than forty years. His articles
extended over a great variety of subjects, but most of them were
essentially reviews and essentially critical. The fact that he was
both a poet and an accomplished critic of verse caused some persons to
ascribe to him the authorship of two articles which had an unhappy
reputation--the criticism which was falsely supposed to have hastened
the death of Keats, and the attack upon the 'Alastor' of Shelley, a
poet for whom Milman had a special admiration. It is now well known
that neither of these articles was by him, but it is characteristic of
his loyalty to his colleagues that he never disclaimed the authorship.
This loyalty was indeed not less conspicuous in his nature than the
singular kindness of disposition with which he ever shrank from giving
pain. After his death a few of his many essays in the 'Quarterly' were
collected in one volume. Among them there is an admirable account of
Erasmus, with whom in mental characteri