the homely: it inexorably refuses the conventional, under which is comprised a vast mass of what some wrongly call elegant. But while I justify the use of homely words in a primary physical, I depreciate them in a secondary moral sense. Mr Arnold clearly is dull to this distinction, or he would not utter against me the following taunt, p. 91:
'To grunt and sweat under a weary load does perfectly well where it comes in Shakspeare: but if the translator of Homer, who will hardly have wound up our minds to the pitch at which these words of Hamlet find them, were to employ, when he has to speak of Homer's heroes under the load of calamity, this figure of "grunting" and "sweating", we should say, He Newmanizes'.
Mr Arnold here not only makes a mistake, he propagates a slander; as if I had ever used such words as grunt and sweat morally. If Homer in the Iliad spoke of grunting swine, as he does of sweating steeds, so should I. As the coarse metaphors here quoted from Shakspeare are utterly opposed to Homer's style, to obtrude them on him would be a gross offence. Mr Arnold sends his readers away with the belief that this is my practice, though he has not dared to assert it. I bear such coarseness in Shakspeare, not because I am 'wound up to a high pitch' by him, 'borne away by a mighty current' (which Mr Arnold, with ingenious unfairness to me, assumes to be
