His inaugural lecture, "On the Modern Element in Literature," was printed many years afterwards in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for February 1869; and this long hesitation seems to have been followed by an even longer repentance, for the piece was never included in any one of his volumes of essays. But the ten years of his professorship are, according to the wise parsimony of the chair, amply represented by the two famous little books--_On Translating Homer_, which, with its supplementary "Last Words," appeared in 1861-62, and _On the Study of Celtic Literature_, which appeared at the termination of his tenure in 1867. It may be questioned whether he ever did anything of more influence than these books, this being due partly to the fashion of their publication--which, in the latter case at least, applied the triple shock of lecture at the greatest of English literary centres, of magazine article, and of book--and partly to the fact that they were about subjects in which a real or a factitious, a direct or an indirect, interest was taken by almost every one. Every educated person knew and cared something (or at least would not have liked to be supposed not to care and know something) about Homer; very few educated persons knew anything about Celtic literature. But in these later lectures he put in a more popular and provocative form than that of his _French Eton_ (see next chapter) that mixture of literary, political, social, and miscellaneous critique of his countrymen for which he was thenceforward best known; and which, if it brought down some hard knocks from his adversaries, and perhaps was not altogether a healthy mixture for himself, could at least not be charged by any reasonable person with lack of piquancy and actuality. Both books are, and, despite some drawbacks of personal and ephemeral allusion, always will be, interesting; and both had, perhaps even more than the _Essays in Criticism_ themselves, a stimulating effect upon English men of letters which can hardly be overvalued. It may indeed be said without paradox that they owe not a little of their value to their faults; but they owe a great deal more to their merits.