to be expected from a professorial chair in a venerable
university--least of all from a professor not yet forty, who might have
been expected to be weighed down and solemnized by the greatness of his
function and the awfulness of his surroundings. Hence arose the simple
and amusing wrath of pedestrian poets like Mr. Ichabod Wright, and
ferocious pedants like Professor Francis Newman, and conventional
worshippers of such idols as Scott and Macaulay, when they found him
poking his seraphic fun at the notion that Homer's song was like "an
elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast," or at
lines so purely prosaic as--

All these thy anxious cares are also mine,
Partner beloved;

or so eccentric as--

Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle

or so painful as--

To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.

This habit of enlisting playfulness in aid of literary judgment was
carried a step further in _Essays in Criticism_, published in 1865. This
book, of which Mr. Paul justly remarks that it was "a great intellectual
event," was a collection of essays written in the years 1863 and 1864.
The original edition contained a preface dealing very skittishly with
Bishop Colenso's biblical aberrations. The allusions to Colenso were
wisely omitted from later editions, but the preface as it stands