took less time to annex Asia than Isocrates spent in writing an oration,
to bid the Greeks attack Persia, we know what he would have thought of
Macaulay’s antithesis. He blames Xenophon for a poor pun, and Plato,
less justly, for mere figurative badinage. It would be an easy task to
ransack contemporaries, even great contemporaries, for similar failings,
for pomposity, for the florid, for sentences like processions of
intoxicated torch-bearers, for pedantic display of cheap erudition, for
misplaced flippancy, for nice derangement of epitaphs wherein no
adjective is used which is appropriate. With a library of cultivated
American novelists and uncultivated English romancers at hand, with our
own voluminous essays, and the essays and histories and “art criticisms”
of our neighbours to draw from, no student need lack examples of what is
wrong. He who writes, reflecting on his own innumerable sins, can but
beat his breast, cry _Mea Culpa_, and resist the temptation to beat the
breasts of his coevals. There are not many authors, there have never
been many, who did not need to turn over the treatise of the Sublime by
day and night.[6]

[Footnote 6: The examples of bombast used to be drawn as late as
Spurden’s translation (1836), from Lee, from _Troilus and Cressida_,
and _The Taming of the Shrew_. Cowley and Crashaw furnished
instances of conceits; Waller, Young, and Hayley of frigidity;
and Darwin of affectation.
“What beaux and beauties crowd the gaudy groves,
And woo and win their _vegetable loves_”--
a phrase adopted--“vapid vegetable loves”--by the Laureate in
“The Talking Oak.”]

As a literary critic of Homer our author is most interesting even in his
errors. He compares the poet of the _Odyssey_ to the sunset: the _Iliad_