merit of being based on a full and thorough knowledge of the Homeric
text. He had seen that Homer is not only a poet, but an "historical
source" of the highest value, a treasure-house of data for the study
of early Greek life and thought, an authority all the more
trustworthy because an unconscious authority, addressing not
posterity but his own contemporaries. With this thorough knowledge
of the matter contained in the poems, Mr. Gladstone was able to
present many interesting and permanently valuable pictures of the
political and social life of Homeric Greece, while the interspersed
literary criticisms are often subtle and suggestive, erring, when
they do err, chiefly through what may be called the over-earnestness
of his mind. He sometimes takes the poet too seriously; he is apt
to read an ethical purpose into descriptive or dramatic touches
which are merely descriptive or dramatic. But he has for his author
not only that intense sympathy which is the best basis for
criticism, but a real justness of poetic taste which the learned and
painstaking German commentator frequently wants. That he was a
sound and accurate scholar in that somewhat narrow sense of the word
which denotes a grammatical and literary mastery of Greek and Latin,
goes without saying. Men of his generation were more apt to keep up
their familiarity with the ancient classics than is the present
generation; and his habit of reading Greek for the sake of his
Homeric studies, and Latin for the sake of his theological, made
this familiarity more than usually thorough. Like most Etonians, he
loved and knew the poets by preference. Theology claimed a place
beside poetry; history came next, and was always a favorite branch
of study. It seemed odd that the constitutional history of England
was by no means one of his strong subjects, but the fact is that
this was preeminently a Whig subject, and Mr. Gladstone never was a
Whig, never learned to think upon the lines of the great Whigs of