'Good,' I said, 'and you must allow me to give mine to Demosthenes. But, though you do not disqualify my subject, I am sure you think poetry the only real treatment; you feel about mere rhetoric what the cavalryman feels as he gallops past the infantry.' 'I hope I am not so mad as that,' he said, 'though a considerable touch of madness is required of him who would pass the gates of poetry.' 'If you come to that, prose cannot do without some divine inspiration either, if it is not to be flat and common.' He admitted that at once: 'I often delight myself with comparing passages from Demosthenes and other prose writers with Homer in point of vehemence, pungency, fire. "Flown with wine" I pair off against the revellings and dancings and debauchery of Philip; "One presage that ne'er fails[18]" finds its counterpart in "It is for brave men, founding themselves upon brave hopes--"; "How would old Peleus, lord of steeds, repine--" is matched by "What a cry of lamentation would go up from the men of those days who laid down their lives for glory and freedom--"; "fluent Python" reminds me of Odysseus's "snow-flake speech"; "If 'twere our lot neither to age nor die," I illustrate by "For every man's life must end in death, though he shut himself up in a narrow chamber for safer keeping." In fact the instances are numberless in which they attack their meaning by the same road. 'I love too to study his feelings and moods and transitions, the variety with which he combats weariness, his resumptions after digression, the charm of his opportune illustrations, and the never-failing native purity of his style. 'It has often struck me about Demosthenes--for I will tell the whole truth out--that that looser of the bonds of speech rebukes Athenian slackness with a dignity that is lacking in the "Greekesses" used by Homer of the Greeks; and again he maintains the tragic intensity proper to the great Hellenic drama more consistently than the poet who inserts speeches at the very crisis of battle and allows energy to evaporate in words. 'As often as I read Demosthenes, the balanced clauses, the rhythmic movement and cadence, make me forget that this is not my beloved poetry; for Homer too abounds in contrast and parallel, in figures startling or simple. It is a provision of nature, I suppose, that each faculty should have its proper equipment attached to it. How should I scorn your Muse? I know her powers too well. 'None the less, I consider my task of a Homeric encomium twice as difficult as your praise of Demosthenes; not because it must be in verse, but from the nature of the material; _I_ cannot lay down a foundation of fact to build the edifice of praise upon; there is nothing but the poems themselves. Everything else is uncertain--his country, his family, his time. If there had been any uncertainty about them, Debate and strife had not divided men;