and _Faust_; it is a perfect, a lovely grandeur. Certainly his poetry
has all the energy and power of the poetry of our ruder climates; but it
has, besides, the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness
of an Ionian sky."

On the ridicule, we must dwell a little more at length; for this was, in
the modern slang, "a new departure" in his critical method. At the date
when he published his lectures _On Translating Homer_, English criticism
of literature was, and for some time had been, an extremely solemn
business. Much of it had been exceedingly good, for it had been produced
by Johnson and Coleridge, and De Quincey and Hazlitt. Much had been
atrociously bad, resembling all too closely Mr. Girdle's pamphlet "in
sixty-four pages, post octavo, on the character of the Nurse's deceased
husband in _Romeo and Juliet_, with an enquiry whether he had really
been a 'merry man' in his lifetime, or whether it was merely his widow's
affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him."[7]

But, whether good or bad, criticism had been solemn. Even Arnold's first
performances in the art had been as grave as Burke or Wordsworth. But in
his lectures _On Translating Homer_ he added a new resource to his
critical apparatus. He still pursued Lucidity, Courage, and Serenity; he
still praised temperately and blamed humanely; but now he brought to the
enforcement of his literary judgment the aid of a delicious playfulness.
Cardinal Newman was not ashamed to talk of "chucking" a thing off, or
getting into a "scrape." So perhaps a humble disciple may be permitted
to say that Arnold pointed his criticisms with "chaff."

This method of depreciating literary performances which one dislikes,
of conveying dissent from literary doctrines which one considers
erroneous, had fallen out of use in our literary criticism. It was least