The description—or catalogue—is twice as long as the foregoing extract, but we cannot afford to multiply quotations. The student of Milton will readily recognise the source of this inspiration, and will regret that those very passages, which every sound judge (if he be not an arrant pedant or a schoolmaster) would wish to be excised from the pages of the “Paradise Lost,” should have been selected for imitation by a young modern poet.
Further, Mr Arnold errs in being unnecessarily minute. Here again he may plead the Homeric example; but we reply, as before, that Arnold is not Homer. That style of description, which Delille happily characterises as “peindre les ongles,” is not only tedious but puerile, and sometimes has a ludicrous effect. Take, for example, the following detailed account of the toilet of an old Tartar gentleman:—
“So said he, and dropp’d Sohrab’s hand, and left
His bed, and the warm rugs whereon he lay,
And o’er his chilly limbs his woollen coat
He pass’d, and tied his sandals on his feet,
And threw a white cloak round him, and he took
In his right hand a ruler’s staff, no sword;
And on his head he placed his sheepskin cap,
Black, glossy, curl’d, the fleece of Kara-Kul;