- throned' in allusion to Assyrian sculptures
or painting, as Rivers probably drew their later poetical attribute 'bull-headed' from the sculpture of fountains? It is a familiar remark, that Homer's poetry presupposes a vast pre-existing art and material. Much in him was traditional. Many of his wild legends came from Asia. He is to us much beside a poet; and that a translator should assume to cut him down to the standard of modern taste, is a thought which all the higher minds of this age have outgrown. How much better is that reverential Docility, which with simple and innocent wonder, receives the oddest notions of antiquity as material of instruction yet to be revealed, than the self-complacent Criticism, which pronouncing everything against modern taste to be grotesque[1] and contemptible, squares the facts to its own 'Axioms'! Homer is noble: but this or that epithet is not noble: therefore we must explode it from Homer! I value, I maintain, I struggle for the 'high a priori road' in
- ↑ Mr Arnold calls it an unfortunate sentence of mine: 'I ought to be quaint; I ought not to be grotesque'. I am disposed to think him right, but for reasons very opposite to those which he assigns. I have 'unfortunately' given to querulous critics a cue for attacking me unjustly. I should rather have said: 'We ought to be quaint, and not to shrink from that which the fastidious modern will be sure to call grotesque in English, when he is too blunted by habit, or too poor a scholar to discern it in the Greek'.
