Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/80

his object in itself, the greatest aversion to mixing up with it anything accidental or personal. His interest was in literature itself; and it was this which gave so rare a stamp to his character, which kept him so free from all taint of littleness. In the saturnalia of ignoble personal passions, of which the struggle for literary success, in old and crowded communities, offers so sad a spectacle, he never mingled. He had not yet traduced his friends, nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, nor praised what he despised. Those who knew him well had the conviction that, even with time, these literary arts would never be his. His poem, of which I before spoke, has some admirable Homeric qualities;—out-of-doors freshness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity. Some of the expressions in that poem,—‘Dangerous Corrievreckan . . . Where roads are unknown to Lock Nevish,’—come back now to my ear with the true Homeric ring. But that in him of which I think oftenest, is the Homeric simplicity of the literary life.