There is no arguing on matters of taste, and exception might easily be taken, sometimes, to his dicta as a critic. But this at least must be conceded by everybody, that in the best and most comprehensive sense of the term he was a man of classical temper, taste, and culture, and that he had all the insight and discernment, all the instincts and sympathies, which are the result of such qualifications. He had no taint of vulgarity, of charlatanism, of insincerity. He never talked or wrote the cant of the cliques or of the multitude. He understood and clung to what was excellent; he had no toleration for what was common and second rate; he was not of the crowd. He belonged to the same type of men as Matthew Arnold and William Cory, a type peculiar to our old Universities before things took the turn which they are taking now. It will be long before we shall have such critics again, and their loss is incalculable. As a scholar Palgrave was rather elegant than profound or exact, and, to judge from a series of lectures delivered by him as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, on _Landscape in Classical Poetry_, and afterwards published in a work which is here reviewed, his acquaintance with the Greek and Roman poets was, if scholarly and sympathetic, somewhat superficial. But he was getting old, and perhaps he had lost his memory or his notes. As a poet he was the author of four volumes, the earliest, published in 1864, entitled _Idylls and Songs_, and the latest, published in 1892, _Amenophis; and other Poems_. But his most ambitious effort appeared in 1882, _Visions of England_, written with the laudable purpose of stirring up in the young the spirit of patriotism. His poetry may be described, not inaptly, in the sentence in which Dr. Johnson sums up the characteristics of Addison’s verses:--“Polished and pure, the production of a mind too judicious to commit faults, but not sufficiently vigorous to attain excellence.” Perhaps they served their end in procuring for him the honourable appointment which he filled competently for ten years--that of the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. It may be said of him as was said of Southey, he was a good man and not a bad poet, or of Agricola, _decentior quam sublimior fuit_. But as a critic of Belles Lettres he was excellent. ANCIENT GREEK AND MODERN LIFE[34] [Footnote 34: _Some Aspects of the Greek Genius._ By S. H. Butcher, Litt. D., LL.D. London.]