is noonday work, the _Odyssey_ is touched with the glow of evening--the
softness and the shadows. “Old age naturally leans,” like childhood,
“towards the fabulous.” The tide has flowed back, and left dim bulks of
things on the long shadowy sands. Yet he makes an exception, oddly
enough, in favour of the story of the Cyclops, which really is the most
fabulous and crude of the fairy tales in the first and greatest of
romances. The Slaying of the Wooers, that admirable fight, worthy of a
saga, he thinks too improbable, and one of the “trifles into which
second childhood is apt to be betrayed.” He fancies that the aged Homer
had “lost his power of depicting the passions”; in fact, he is hardly a
competent or sympathetic critic of the _Odyssey_. Perhaps he had lived
among Romans till he lost his sense of humour; perhaps he never had any
to lose. On the other hand, he preserved for us that inestimable and not
to be translated fragment of Sappho--φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θεοῖσιν.

It is curious to find him contrasting Apollonius Rhodius as faultless,
with Homer as great but faulty. The “faultlessness” of Apollonius is not
his merit, for he is often tedious, and he has little skill in
selection; moreover, he is deliberately antiquarian, if not pedantic.
His true merit is in his original and, as we think, modern telling of a
love tale--pure, passionate, and tender, the first in known literature.
Medea is often sublime, and always touching. But it is not on these
merits that our author lingers; he loves only the highest literature,
and, though he finds spots on the sun and faults in Homer, he condones
them as oversights passed in the poet’s “contempt of little things.”

Such for us to-day are the lessons of Longinus. He traces dignity and
fire of style to dignity and fire of soul. He detects and denounces the
very faults of which, in each other, all writers are conscious, and
which he brings home to ourselves. He proclaims the essential merits of