Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/47

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recovered almost suddenly, and we determined to go through the Troad together.

My comrade was a capital Grecian; it is true that his singular mind so ordered and disposed the classic lore which he had gained, as to impress it with something of an original and barbarous character—with an almost gothic quaintness, more properly belonging to a rich native ballad, than to the poetry of Hellas; there was a certain impropriety in his knowing so much Greek—an unfitness in the idea of marble fauns, and satyrs, and even Olympian Gods, lugged in under the oaken roof, and the painted light of an odd old Norman hall. But Methley abounding in Homer, really loved him (as I believe) in all truth, without whim or fancy; moreover, he had a good deal of the practical sagacity, or sharpness, or whatever you call it

and this enabled him to apply his knowledge with much more tact than is usually shown by people so learned as he.

I, too, loved Homer, but not with a scholar's love. The most humble and pious amongst women was yet so proud a mother that she could teach her first-born son, no Watts' hymns—no collects for the day; she could teach him in earliest childhood, no less than this—to find a home in his saddle, and to love old Homer, and all that Homer sung. True it is, that the Greek was ingeniously rendered into English—the English of Pope even, but it is not such a mesh as that, that can screen an earnest child from the fire of Homer's battles.

I pored over the Odyssey as over a story-book, hoping and fearing for the hero whom yet I partly scorned. But the Iliad