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PRIMITIVE BALLADS, MODERN CRITICISM, ANCIENT SKEPTICISM: MACAULAY’S LAYS OF ANCIENT ROME

ONE OF THE BEST selling volumes of Victorian verse, as Donald Gray has shown, was Thomas Babington Macaulay’s The Lays of Ancient Rome first published in 1842 (Complete Writings 19: 167–279). For a generation after its publication, the Lays also generally enjoyed the praise of critics and poets.1 But in 1860, just months after Macaulay had been interred in Poets’ Corner, Matthew Arnold offered up the Lays as a touchstone of the grandly bad. In his lectures On Translating Homer, Arnold said that “a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all” (1: 211). Arnold’s put-down was echoed in later works such as Thomas Humphry Ward’s multi-volume anthology The English Poets (1880), which opened with Arnold’s essay “The Study of Poetry.” Ward cited the continuing popularity of the Lays, but he pointed out that “the higher critical authorities have pronounced against them, and are even teaching us to wonder whether they can be called poetry at all. They find in the Lays the same faults which mar the author’s prose — commonplaceness of ideas, cheapness of sentiment and imagery, made to prevail by dint of the writer’s irresistible command of a new rhetorical force; in a word, eloquent Philistinism” (4: 540).