like Homer's, easy indeed, but mastering our ear with a fulness of power which is irresistible.
I said that a certain style might be the genuine style of ballad-poetry, but yet not the style of Homer. The analogy of the ballad is ever present to Mr Newman's thoughts in considering Homer; and perhaps nothing has more caused his faults than this analogy,—this popular, but, it is time to say, this erroneous analogy. 'The moral qualities of Homer's style', says Mr Newman, 'being like to those of the English ballad, we need a metre of the same genius. Only those metres, which by the very possession of these qualities are liable to degenerate into doggerel, are suitable to reproduce the ancient epic'. 'The style of Homer', he says, in a passage which I have before quoted, 'is direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous: in all these respects it is similar to the old English ballad'. Mr Newman, I need not say, is by no means alone in this opinion. 'The most really and truly Homeric of all the creations of the English muse is', says Mr Newman's critic in the National Review, 'the ballad-poetry of ancient times; and the association between metre and subject is one that it would be true wisdom to preserve'. 'It is confessed', says Chapman's last editor, Mr Hooper, 'that the fourteen-syllable verse' (that is, a ballad-verse) 'is peculiarly
