Introductory lecture delivered before the Faculties of Arts and Laws and of Science in University College, London, October 3, 1892 / by A.E. Housman.

  • Housman, A. E. (Alfred Edward), 1859-1936.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Introductory lecture delivered before the Faculties of Arts and Laws and of Science in University College, London, October 3, 1892 / by A.E. Housman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    discrimination between good and bad ; but can they create it ? Take the greatest scholar that England or perhaps that Europe ever bred; a man so great that in his own province he serves for a touchstone of merit and has always been admired by all admirable scholars and despised by all despicable scholars: Richard Bentley. Bentley was born in the year 1662, and he brought with him into the world, like most men born near that date, a prosaic mind; nor did all his immense study of the classics avail to confer on him a true appreciation of poetry. While he dealt with the classical poets he was comparatively safe, for in dealing with these a prosaic mind is not so grave a disqualification as a dithyrambic mind ; and Bentley had lived with the ancients till he understood them as no one will ever understand them who brings to their study a taste formed on the poetry of Elizabeth’s time or ours. But that jealous deity which loves, Herodotus tells us, to strike down towering things, put it into his heart to invade a literature with which he was ill acquainted, and to edit Paradise Lost. He persuaded himself that Milton in his blindness had become the victim of an un- scrupulous person, who had introduced into the poem a great deal that Milton never wrote, and had altered for the worse a great deal that he did write. Accordingly, whenever Milton’s poetry failed to come up to Bentley’s prosaic notions of what poetry ought to be, he detected the hand, or, as he preferred to call it, the fist, of this first editor. Milton relates how “four speedy Cherubim ” were sent out with trumpets to summon an assembly. “Four speedy Cherubim” says Bentley: “Not much need of swiftness to be a good trumpeter. For speedy I suspect the poet gave ‘Four sturdy Cherubim.’ Stout, robust, able to blow a strong blast.” Milton relates how Uriel at sunset came to Paradise to warn the guards of the approach of Satan : “ Thither came Uriel, gliding through the even.” Bentley insists on altering even to heaven, because, as he acutely observes, evening is a division of time, not of space, and conse- quently you cannot come gliding through it: you might as well say, he exclaims, “ came gliding through six o’clock.” Milton relates how Ithuriel found Satan disguised as a toad whispering at the ear of Eve : “ Him, thus intent, Ithuriel with