very much less deliberately Greek than _Merope_, is very much better
poetry, and it is almost impossible that the comparison of the two
should not suggest to the reader that the attempt to be Greek is
exactly and precisely the cause of the failure to be poetical. Mr
Arnold had forgotten his master's words about the _oikeia hedone_. The
pleasure of Greek art is one thing--the pleasure of English poetry
another.

His inaugural lecture, "On the Modern Element in Literature," was
printed many years afterwards in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for February
1869; and this long hesitation seems to have been followed by an even
longer repentance, for the piece was never included in any one of his
volumes of essays. But the ten years of his professorship are,
according to the wise parsimony of the chair, amply represented by the
two famous little books--_On Translating Homer_, which, with its
supplementary "Last Words," appeared in 1861-62, and _On the Study of
Celtic Literature_, which appeared at the termination of his tenure in
1867. It may be questioned whether he ever did anything of more
influence than these books, this being due partly to the fashion of
their publication--which, in the latter case at least, applied the
triple shock of lecture at the greatest of English literary centres,
of magazine article, and of book--and partly to the fact that they
were about subjects in which a real or a factitious, a direct or an
indirect, interest was taken by almost every one. Every educated
person knew and cared something (or at least would not have liked to
be supposed not to care and know something) about Homer; very few
educated persons knew anything about Celtic literature. But in these
later lectures he put in a more popular and provocative form than that
of his _French Eton_ (see next chapter) that mixture of literary,
political, social, and miscellaneous critique of his countrymen for