eartiness and humour, is to be found in innumerable and indescribable
bits, phrases, sentences, short paragraphs, which have, more than
anything out of the dialogues of the very best novels, the character and
charm of actual conversation. To read a _Noctes_ has, for those who have
the happy gift of realising literature, not much less than the effect of
actually taking part in one, with no danger of headache or indigestion
after, and without the risk of being playfully corked, or required to
leap the table for a wager, or forced to extemporise sixteen stanzas
standing on the mantelpiece. There must be some peculiar virtue in this,
for, as is very well known, the usual dialogue leaves the reader more
outside of it than almost any other kind of literature.

This peculiar charm is of necessity wanting to the rest of Wilson's
works, and in so far they are inferior to the _Noctes_; but they have
compensatory merits of their own, while, considered merely as
literature, there are better things in them than anything that is to be
found in the colloquies of those men of great gormandising
abilities--Christopher North, James Hogg, and Timothy Tickler. Of the
four volumes of _Essays Critical and Imaginative_, the fourth, on Homer
and his translators, with an unfinished companion piece on the Greek
drama, stands by itself, and has indeed, I believe, been separately
published. It is well worth reading through at a sitting, which cannot
be said of every volume of criticism. What is more, it may, I think, be
put almost first in its own division of the art, though whether that
division of the art is a high or low one is another question. I should
not myself rank it very high. With Wilson, criticism, at least here, is
little more than the eloquent expression of likes and dislikes. The long
passages in which he deals with the wrath of Achilles and with the love
of Calypso, though subject to the general stricture already more than
once passed, are really beautiful specimens of literary enthusiasm; nor
is there anything in English more calculated to initiate the reader,
especially the young reader, in the love at least, if not the
understanding, of Homer. The same enthusiastic and obviously quite
genuine appreciation appears in the essay on the "Agamemnon." But of
criticism as criticism--of what has been called tracing of literary
cause and effect, of any coherent and co-ordinated theory of the good
and bad in verse and prose, and the reason