events, you feel that they are, so to speak, travelling out of their own province: in the best of them you feel this perceptibly, but in those of a lower order you feel it very strongly. Even Sir Walter Scott's efforts of this kind, even, for instance, the
Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
or the
O woman! in our hours of ease,
even these leave, I think, as high poetry, much to be desired; far more than the same poet's descriptions of a hunt or a battle. But Lord Macaulay's
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The captain of the gate:
'To all the men upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late'.
(and here, since I have been reproached with undervaluing Lord Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, let me frankly say that, to my mind, a man's power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all), I say, Lord Macaulay's
To all the men upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late,
it is hard to read without a cry of pain. But with Homer it is very different. This 'noble barbarian', this 'savage with the lively eye', whose verse, Mr Newman thinks, would affect us, if we could hear the living Homer, 'like an elegant and simple melody
