he wore was of a double kind,
the national costume of the Magnesians.... Nor as yet had
the glossy clusters of his hair been clipped away, but
dangled brightly adown his back.

Forward he went at once and took his stand among the
people.... Him then they failed to recognise: but some of the
reverent-minded went so far as to say, 'Surely this cannot be
Apollo!'

It needs no comment, I think. Surely _this_ cannot be Apollo!

Frederick Paley flourished--if the word be not exorbitant for so
demure a writer--in the middle of the last century (he was born
in the year of Waterloo and died in the year after Queen
Victoria's first jubilee). Well, in that period there grew up a
race of pioneers who saw that English Literature--that proud park
and rolling estate--lay a tangled, neglected wilderness for its
inheritors, and set themselves bravely to clear broad ways
through it. Furnivall and Skeat, Aldis Wright, Clark, Grosart,
Arber, Earle, Hales, Morris, Ellis and the rest--who can rehearse
these names now but in deepest respect? Oh, believe me,
Gentlemen! they were wonderful fighters in a cause that at first
seemed hopeless. If I presume to speak of foibles to-day, you
will understand that I do so because, lightly though I may talk
to you at times, I have a real sense of the responsibilities of
this Chair. I worship great learning, which they had: I loathe
flippant detraction of what is great; I have usually a heart for
men-against-odds and the unpopular cause. But these very valiant
fighters had, one and all, some very obvious foibles: and
because, in the hour of success, these foibles came to infect the
whole teaching of English in this country, and to infect it
fatally for many years, I shall dare to point them out.

VI

(a) To begin with, then, these valiant fighters, intent on
pushing their cause to the front, kept no sense of proportion.
All their geese were swans, and "Beowulf" a second "Iliad." I
think it scarcely too much to say that, of these men, all so
staunch in fighting for the claims of English Literature, not one
(with the exception of Dr Hales) appears to have had any critical
judgment whatever, apart from the rhyme, verse and inflectional
tests on which they bestowed their truly priceless industry.
Criticism, as Sainte-Beuve, Matthew Arnold or Pater understood
and practised it, they merely misprized.

(b) I think it was of true scholarly desire to vindicate English
Literature from the ch