which he was thenceforward best known; and which, if it brought down
some hard knocks from his adversaries, and perhaps was not altogether
a healthy mixture for himself, could at least not be charged by any
reasonable person with lack of piquancy and actuality.

Both books are, and, despite some drawbacks of personal and ephemeral
allusion, always will be, interesting; and both had, perhaps even more
than the _Essays in Criticism_ themselves, a stimulating effect
upon English men of letters which can hardly be overvalued. It may
indeed be said without paradox that they owe not a little of their
value to their faults; but they owe a great deal more to their merits.

The faults are apparent enough even in the first series, which falls
to be noticed in this chapter; yet it is really difficult to say when
a more important book of English criticism had appeared. Dryden's
_Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, Johnson's _Lives_ at their frequent best,
Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_, are greater things; but hardly the
best of them was in its day more "important for _us_." To read even
the best of that immediately preceding criticism of which something
has been said above--nay, even to recur to Coleridge and Hazlitt and
Lamb--and then to take up _On Translating Homer_, is to pass to a
critic with a far fuller equipment, with a new method, with a style of
his own, and with an almost entirely novel conception of the whole art
of criticism. For the first time (even Coleridge with much wider
reading had not co-ordinated it from this point of view) we find the
two great ancient and the three or four great modern literatures of
Europe taken synoptically, used to illustrate and explain each other,
to point out each other's defects and throw up each other's merits.
Almost for the first time, too, we have ancient literature treated
more or less like modern--neither from the merely philological point