this figure is a perfectly sound and correct figure, no doubt; Mr Knight even calls it a 'happy' figure; but it is a difficult figure: Homer would not have used it. Again, when Lady Macbeth says,
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man,
the thought in the two last of these lines is, when you seize it, a perfectly clear thought, and a fine thought; but it is a curious thought: Homer would not have used it. These are favourable instances of the union of plain style and words with a thought not plain in quality; but take stronger instances of this union,—let the thought be not only not plain in quality, but highly fanciful: and you have the Elizabethan conceits; you have, in spite of idiomatic style and idiomatic diction, everything which is most un-Homeric; you have such atrocities as this of Chapman:
Fate shall fail to vent her gall
Till mine vent thousands.
I say, the poets of a nation which has produced such conceit as that, must purify themselves seven times in the fire before they can hope to render Homer. They must expel their nature with a fork, and keep crying to one another night and day: 'Homer not only moves rapidly, not only speaks idiomatically; he is, also, free from fancifulness'.
