had scarcely begun to
assert themselves at Oxford. Similar defects may be discerned in other
eminent writers of his own and the preceding generation of Oxford
men, defects from which persons of inferior power in later days might
be free. In some of these writers, and particularly in Cardinal
Newman, the contrast between dialectical acumen, coupled with
surpassing rhetorical skill, and the vitiation of the argument by a
want of the critical faculty, is scarcely less striking; and the
example of that illustrious man suggests that the dominance of the
theological view of literary and historical problems, a dominance
evident in Mr. Gladstone, counts for something in producing the
phenomenon.

With these defects, Mr. Gladstone's Homeric work had the merit of
being based on a full and thorough knowledge of the Homeric text. He
had seen, at a time when few people in England had seen it, that the
Homeric poems are an historical source of the highest value, a
treasure-house of data for the study of early Greek life and thought,
an authority all the more trustworthy because an unconscious
authority, addressing not posterity but contemporaries. This mastery
of the matter contained in the poems enabled him to present valuable
pictures of the political and social life of Homeric Greece, while the
interspersed literary criticisms are often subtle and suggestive,
erring, when they do err, chiefly through the over-earnestness of his
mind. He often takes the poet too seriously; reading an ethical
purpose into descriptive or dramatic touches which are merely
descriptive or dramatic. Passages whose moral tendency offends him are
reprobated as later insertions with a naivete which forgets the
character of a primitive age. But he has for his author not only that
sympathy which is the best basis for criticism, but a justness of
poetic taste which the learned and painstaking German commentator
frequently wants. That Mr. Gladstone was a sound scholar in that
narrower sense of the word which denotes a grammatical and literary
command of Greek and Latin, goes without saying. Men of his generation
kept a closer hold upon the ancient classics than we do to-day; and
his habit of reading Greek for the sake of his Homeric studies, and
Latin for the sake of his theological, made this familiarity more than
usually thorough. Like most Etonians, he loved and knew the poets by
preference. Dante was his favourite poet, perhaps because Dante is the
most t