giving it his best attention, he found it did not hold water, then no
weight of authority could make him say that it did. This matter of
the geography of the 'Iliad' is only one among many commonly received
opinions which he examined for himself and found no reason to
dispute; on these he considered it unnecessary to write.

It is characteristic of his passion for doing things thoroughly that
he learnt nearly the whole of the 'Odyssey' and the 'Iliad' by heart.
He had a Pickering copy of each poem, which he carried in his pocket
and referred to in railway trains, both in England and Italy, when
saying the poems over to himself. These two little books are now in
the library of St. John's College, Cambridge. He was, however,
disappointed to find that he could not retain more than a book or two
at a time and that, on learning more, he forgot what he had learnt
first; but he was about sixty at the time. Shakespeare's Sonnets, on
which he published a book in 1899, gave him less trouble in this
respect; he knew them all by heart, and also their order, and one
consequence of this was that he wrote some sonnets in the
Shakespearian form. He found this intimate knowledge of the poet's
work more useful for his purpose than reading commentaries by those
who are less familiar with it. "A commentary on a poem," he would
say, "may be useful as material on which to form an estimate of the
commentator, but the poem itself is the most important document you
can consult, and it is impossible to know it too intimately if you
want to form an opinion about it and its author."

It was always the author, the work of God, that interested him more
than the book--the work of man; the painter more than the picture;
the composer more than the music. "If a writer, a painter, or a
musician makes me feel that he held those things to be lovable which