Lord Cromer was fond of saying that he considered the main beauty of Greek poetry to reside in its simplicity. In all his verses he aimed at limpidity and ease. He praised the Greek poets for not rhapsodising about the beauties of nature, and this was very characteristic of his own eighteenth-century habit of mind. His general attitude to poetry, which he read incessantly and in four languages, was a little difficult to define. He was ready to give lists of his life-long prime favourites, and, as was very natural, these differed from time to time. But one list of the books he had "read more frequently than any other" consisted of the _Iliad_, the Book of Job, _Tristram Shandy_, and _Pickwick_, to which he added _Lycidas_ and the Tenth Satire of Juvenal. It would require a good deal of ingenuity to bring these six masterpieces into line. He was consistent in declaring that the 28th chapter of Job was "the finest bit of poetry ever written." He was violently carried away in 1912 by reading Mr. Livingstone's book on _The Greek Genius_. It made him a little regret the pains he had expended on the Hymns of Callimachus and the Bucolics of Theocritus, and he thought that perhaps he ought to have confined himself to the severer and earlier classics. But surely he had followed his instinct, and it would have been a pity if he had narrowed his range. It was the modernness of the Alexandrian authors, and perhaps their Egyptian flavour, which had justly attracted him. He did not care very much for an antiquity which he could not revivify for his own vision. I urged him to read a book which had fascinated me, _The Religion of Numa_, by a learned American, the late Mr. Jesse Carter. Lord Cromer read it with respect, but he admitted that those earliest Roman ages were too remote and cold for him.