elucidation and establishment of one's ideas, one may get much. Even bad criticisms may thus be made suggestive and fruitful. I declared, in a former lecture on this subject, my conviction that criticism is not the strong point of our national literature. Well, even the bad criticisms on our present topic which I meet with, serve to illustrate this conviction for me. And thus one is enabled, even in reading remarks which for Homeric criticism, for their immediate subject, have no value, which are far too personal in spirit, far too immoderate in temper, and far too heavy-handed in style, for the delicate matter they have to treat, still to gain light and confirmation for a serious idea, and to follow the Baconian injunction, semper aliquid addiscere, always to be adding to one's stock of observation and knowledge. Yes, even when we have to do with writers who, to quote the words of an exquisite critic, the master of us all in criticism, M. Sainte-Beuve, remind us, when they handle such subjects as our present, of 'Romans of the fourth or fifth century, coming to hold forth, all at random, in African style, on papers found in the desk of Augustus, Mæcenas, or Pollio', even then we may instruct ourselves if we may regard ideas and not persons; even then we may enable ourselves to say, with the same critic describing the effect made upon him by D'Argenson's Memoirs: 'My taste is re-
