Footnote 51: _Aristotelis Fragmenta._ Ed. Valentine Rose, Leipsic, 1886. P. 120 _sq._ Footnote 52: See below, p. 73 _sq._ These are mainly moral questions; but the great philosopher appears to have carried his solicitude so far as to meddle with military matters. “Why [somebody had asked], in _Il._ iv. 67-69, are the cavalry represented as marshalled in front, the cowards in the middle, and the best infantry behind?” If Aristotle had heard of the “cavalry screen” he would no doubt have used this _lusis_: as it is, it appears, he suggested that _prota_ means not “in front” but “on the wings.” And there is all the quality which endeared Aristotle to the idler side (which was not the only side by any means) of Scholasticism, in his condescension to the _aporia_—"If the gods drank nothing but nectar, why is Calypso spoken of as ‘mixing’ for Hermes? For any ‘mixture,’ even with water, is something different from nectar; and, therefore, as the gods do not drink their nectar neat, they do not drink that only." Quoth the great master (in reply, or at least “Schol. T.” says so), “The word does not only mean to ‘mix,’ but also simply to ‘pour,’ and this is what Calypso did.” But why should Calypso herself and Circe and Ino, alone of goddesses, have the epithet αὐδήεσσα? Even he could not answer that, and was driven ignominiously to suggest a change of reading. It is not, I hope, necessary to say that I have no intention of raising an inept laugh at the Great One. As has been already said, the attitude of the Greeks to Homer was the attitude of a seventeenth-century Puritan to the English Scriptures. Every word, almost every letter, had its reason and its meaning—often many more than one—which had to be reverently sought out. The analogy, however, itself establishes and makes clear my point, which is to show that an attitude of this kind practically excludes pure literary criticism on the one hand, and is exceedingly unlikely on the other to be taken up by any one who is strongly bent towards such criticism. We know how Milton, who must have had an exquisite critical gusto originally, and who never wholly lost it, was by the cultivation of such an attitude so stunted and checked in his taste that he could throw the reading of Shakespeare in his dead king’s face,[53] dismiss the delightful work (hardly inferior to the best of his own) of the Cavalier poets as “vulgar amorism” and “trencher fury,” and even when he was not thinking of matter, sink all critical perspective in his blind craze against rhyme itself. The Homer-worship of the Greeks on the one hand, and their philosophical preoccupations on the other, had almost unavoidably a similar effect, though not so bad a one. Footnote 53: I have, I think, seen protests against this statement. The protesters either do not know Milton’s text, or are of that foolish order of worshippers which simply shuts its eyes to disagreeable “næves” in the idol.