To take arms against a sea of troubles,
the figure there is undoubtedly most faulty, it by no means runs on four legs; but the thing is said so freely and idiomatically, that it passes. This, however, is not a point to which I now want to call your attention; I want you to remark, in Shakspeare and others, only that which we may directly apply to Homer. I say, then, that in Shakspeare the thought is often, while most idiomatically uttered, nay, while good and sound in itself, yet of a quality which is curious and difficult; and that this quality of thought is something entirely un-Homeric. For example, when Lady Macbeth says:
Memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only,
this figure is a perfectly sound and correct figure, no doubt; Mr Knight even calls it a ‘happy’ figure; but it is a difficult figure: Homer would not have used it. Again, when Lady Macbeth says,
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man,
the thought in the two last of these lines is, when you seize it, a perfectly clear thought, and a fine thought; but it is a curious thought: Homer would not have used it. These are favourable instances of the union of plain style and words with a thought not plain in quality; but take stronger instances of this union,—let the thought be not only not plain in quality, but highly fanciful: and you have the Elizabethan conceits; you have, in spite of idiomatic style and idiomatic diction, everything which is most un-Homeric; you have such atrocities as this of Chapman: