Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/16

Rh one has at finding a person to whom words one thought all the world knew seem strange, and words one thought entirely strange, intelligible. Yet this simple expression of my bewilderment Mr. Newman construes into an accusation that he is ‘often guilty of keeping low company,’ and says that I shall ‘never want a stone to throw at him.’ And what is stranger still, one of his friends gravely tells me that Mr. Newman ‘lived with the fellows of Balliol.’ As if that made Mr. Newman’s glossary less inexplicable to me! As if he could have got his glossary from the fellows of Balliol! As if I could believe, that the members of that distinguished society,—of whose discourse, not so many years afterwards, I myself was an unworthy hearer,—were in Mr. Newman’s time so far removed from the Attic parity of speech which we all of us admired, that when one of them called a calf a bulkin, the rest ‘easily understood’ him; or, when he wanted to say that a newspaper-article was ‘proudly fine,’ it mattered little whether he said it was that or bragly! No; his having lived with the fellows of Balliol does not explain Mr. Newman’s glossary to me. I will no longer ask ‘with whom he can have lived,’ since that gives him offence; but I must still declare that where he got his test of rarity or intelligibility for words is a mystery to me.

That, however, does not prevent me from entertaining a very sincere respect for Mr. Newman