m, and if,
after giving it his best attention, he found it did not hold water,
then no weight of authority could make him say that it did. This
matter of the geography of the Iliad is only one among many commonly
received opinions which he examined for himself and found no reason
to dispute; on these he considered it unnecessary to write.

It is characteristic of his passion for doing things thoroughly that
he learnt nearly the whole of the Odyssey and the Iliad by heart.
He had a Pickering copy of each poem, which he carried in his pocket
and referred to in railway trains, both in England and Italy, when
saying the poems over to himself. These two little books are now in
the library of St. John's College, Cambridge. He was, however,
disappointed to find that he could not retain more than a book or
two at a time and that, on learning more, he forgot what he had
learnt first; but he was about sixty at the time. Shakespeare's
Sonnets, on which he published a book in 1899, gave him less trouble
in this respect; he knew them all by heart, and also their order,
and one consequence of this was that he wrote some sonnets in the
Shakespearian form. He found this intimate knowledge of the poet's
work more useful for his purpose than reading commentaries by those
who were less familiar with it. "A commentary on a poem," he would
say, "may be useful as material on which to form an estimate of the
commentator, but the poem itself is the most important document you
can consult, and it is impossible to know it too intimately if you
want to form an opinion about it and its author."

It was always the author, the work of God, that interested him more
than the book--the work of man; the painter more than the picture;
the composer more than the music. "If a writer, a painter, or a
musician makes me feel that he held those things to be lovable which
I myself hold to be lovable I am satisfied; art is only interesting
in so far as it reveals the personality of the artist." Handel was,
of course, "the greatest of all musicians." Among the painters he
chiefly loved Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Gaudenzio Ferrari,
Rembrandt, Holbein, Velasquez, and De Hooghe; in poetry Shakespeare,
Homer, and the Authoress of the Odyssey; and in architecture the
man, whoever he was, who designed the Temple of Neptune at Paestum.
Life being short, he did not see why he should waste any of it in
the company of inferior people when he had these. And he