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‘Good,’ I said, ‘and you must allow me to give mine to Demosthenes. But, though you do not disqualify my subject, I am sure you think poetry the only real treatment; you feel about mere rhetoric what the cavalryman feels as he gallops past the infantry.” ‘I hope I am not so mad as that,’ he said, ‘though a considerable touch of madness is required of him who would pass the gates of poetry.’ ‘If you come to that, prose cannot do without some divine inspiration either, if it is not to be flat and common.’ He admitted that at once: ‘I often delight myself with comparing passages from Demosthenes and other prose writers with Homer in point of vehemence, pungency, fire. “ Flown with wine” I pair off against the revellings and dancings and debauchery of Philip; “ One presage that ne’er failsHomer, Il. xii, 243. ‘One o.nen is best—to fight for our own country.'" finds its counterpart in “ It is for brave men, founding themselves upon brave hopes—"; “How would old Peleus, lord of steeds, repine—” is matched by “What a cry of lamentation woyld go up from the men of those days who laid down their lives for glory and freedom—”; “fluent Python” reminds me of Odysseus’s “snow-flake speech”; "If 'twere our lot neither to age nor die,” I illustrate by “ For every man’s life must end in death, though he shut himself up in a narrow chamber for safer keeping.” In fact the instances are numberless in which they attack their meaning by the same road.
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‘I love too to study his feelings and moods and transitions, the variety with which he combats weariness, his resumptions after digression, the charm of his opportune illustrations, and the never-failing native purity of his style.
