the poem into English prose, he also translated the Iliad, and, in
March, 1895, went to Greece and the Troad to see the country therein
described, where he found nothing to cause him to disagree with the
received theories.

It has been said of him in a general way that the fact of an opinion
being commonly held was enough to make him profess the opposite. It
was enough to make him examine the opinion for himself, when it
affected any of the many subjects which interested him, 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