or any interest? A language with such cruel superfluities as a middle
voice and a dual; a language whose verbs were so fantastically irregular,
looked like a barbaric survival, a mere plague and torment. So one
thought till Homer was opened before us. Elsewhere I have tried to
describe the vivid delight of first reading Homer, delight, by the way,
which St. Augustine failed to appreciate. Most boys not wholly immersed
in dulness felt it, I think; to myself, for one, Homer was the real
beginning of study. One had tried him, when one was very young, in Pope,
and had been baffled by Pope, and his artificial manner, his "fairs," and
"swains." Homer seemed better reading in the absurd "crib" which Mr.
Buckley wrote for Bohn's series. Hector and Ajax, in that disguise, were
as great favourites as Horatius on the Bridge, or the younger Tarquin.
Scott, by the way, must have made one a furious and consistent
Legitimist. In reading the "Lays of Ancient Rome," my sympathies were
with the expelled kings, at least with him who fought so well at Lake
Regillus:--

"Titus, the youngest Tarquin,
Too good for such a breed."

Where--

"Valerius struck at Titus,
And lopped off half his crest;
But Titus stabbed Valerius
A span deep in the breast,"--

I find, on the margin of my old copy, in a schoolboy's hand, the words
"Well done, the Jacobites!" Perhaps my politics have never gone much
beyond this sentiment. But this is a digression from Homer. The very