lator; the whole third line is a paraphrase of the single word EpETTópEvo, munching or champing; and the epithet "tether'd," cumbers the style by its willful intrusion, and crowds out the beautiful epithet belonging to "morn," povov 'H. Take another instance. For ἦ καὶ ἐμοὶ τάδε πάντα μέλει, γύναι (vi. 441), Arnold gives "Woman, I too take thought for this." But Derby spins it out into, "Think not, dear wife, that by such thoughts as these My heart has ne'er been wrung." Perhaps Arnold's is bald, but Derby's is as bad as a wig or a waterfall. Let one more example suffice. A little earlier in the same book (vi. 333) Paris says to Hector: "Since you have rebuked me just far enough, and no farther, therefore I will speak to you, and do you understand and listen to me." Thus Homer, but Lord Derby has: "Hector, I own not causeless thy rebuke; Yet will I speak; hear thou and understand." Here the inversion in the first line, and the antithesis implied by "yet" in the second, are both foreign to the original, and make the style less direct and plain. 3. Has this translation plainness and directness of thought? Yes, and in general, great fidelity to the thought of the original. In a few cases that we have noticed, a metaphor almost like one of Chapman's out of-the-way conceits, is dragged in; as in i. 51, Béλos équeis Báλλs is translated "was poured the arrowy storm." In some cases also, the connection of clauses is changed, even to the altering of the thought sometimes. Whether this is done from carelessness, or from effort after clearness, or from stress of difficulty in translating, we cannot determine. For instance in i. 29-32, where the literal translation is, "Her will I not release; sooner even old age shall come upon her in my home, in Argos, far from her native land, plying the loom and sharing my bed;" Lord Derby has, "Her I release not, till her youth be fled; And share a master's bed." The change of connection obliges him to introduce the idea in the words "her lot is cast." Again in i. 580-3 Hêphæstus advises Hêrê to conciliate Zeus lest he be angry. "For if the thunderer of Olympus should wish to hurl us from our seats, (he could), for he is far the strongest. But do you soothe him with soft answers, then will he at once be mild to us." Now this plain thought Derby changes thus: "Nay though Olympian Jove, the lightning's Lord, We might propitiate best the King of Heaven." 4. Has this new version the nobility of the original? Any one who has read Arnold's lectures will remember the lively and cutting criticism with which he attacks Mr. Newman's translation of Homer on this score. No one will deny that his denunciation of this particular fault is fully supported by the examples he gives, whatever may be the merits of that translation as a whole. Yet we must confess that to us this is the least satisfactory part of his whole discussion. He does not prove, it strikes us, that Homer was never, to his Athenian readers of the age of Sophoclês, either quaint or garrulous, and that he does not, or ought not to seem so to modern scholars familiar with the Attic language of that period. The fact that Homer was, in some sense, the Bible of the Greeks, was memorized and quoted by them from childhood on through life, does not prove that his language had not to them the same flavor of quaintness, of remoteness from ordinary or literary language, which the Bible in our English version has to us now, and will have, perhaps, much more 150 years hence, that is, at a similar interval. We find in the Bible some words that have gone out of use entirely by this time, as wot, leasing, purtenance; others that have changed their meaning, as prevent; others their form, as bewray. Such differences as these, with others of construction and usage, make the distance between Homer and the Attic Greek. No more is it proved that Homer was never garrulous by citing the extreme garrulity of the Medieval romancers, and asking if Homer produces the same, or in any degree a similar impression. A fair argument would be to take up passages that are thought to have these qualities, and prove that they have not, or ought not to have in the judgment of an intelligent reader. There are passages in Homer that seem to us, after all that Arnold has to say, both quaint and garrulous. It constitutes quaintness, we think, and is a characteristic of poems designed for oral recitation, that constant repetitions should occur, sometimes of the noun in a sentence where the pronoun might have taken its place, sometimes of whole sentences and long passages, as where a message is given to Iris or to a dream, and then repeated entire by the messenger a few lines later. To the same style belongs the use of stock phrases, epithets constantly repeated with proper names, often without regard to their suiting the context. To the same homely style it is due, that when Athênê comes into the angry discussion between Achil les and Agamemnon and stands behind Achilles, she seizes him by the hair to attract his attention (Il. i. 197). The humor of the poet, as when an "inextinguishable laugh" is started in Olympus at the sight of Hêphæstus hobbling around in the office of graceful Hêbê, or when in the Odyssey the hero avows, half complainingly, that his woes, extreme as they are, do not prevent his always having a very good appetite, is a quaint humor. And for garrulity, does not the poet purposely assume it as a characterizing tone in the long speeches of Nestor? Can we see anything else in the boasting genealogies which the heroes utter, often in the midst of the fight, than the garrulity of an early, almost childlike stage of literature? In the similes, too, how often is one of them carried through without containing some feature of description which does not bear directly upon the point of comparison, but comes in simply because it was in the poet's mental view and he could not repress it, the very essence of garrulity? In the rest of this criticism, Arnold is in the main right,Homer is never to an English reader prosaic, never mean or low. How much this is owing to its being all in a foreign language, and that, too, one so varied, fluent and sonorous as Homer's Greek, is an interesting question that does not occur to Mr. Arnold. Not a little, we are inclined to think, in the passages that describe the homely operations of dressing, cookjust so much is the difficulty of transThe fact that just here all translations ing, washing, &c., and lating them increased. fail, confirms our view. The question is only which makes the least lamentable failure. Let us compare Lord Derby with the best known of his predecessors in one such passage. It is the first passage of the kind that we come to, Il. x. 21-24. "And rising he put round his body a tunic, and under his feet bound beautiful sandals, and then about him he wrapped the dark-hued skin of a huge tawny lion, which reached to his feet; and he took up his spear." Hear now the translators: Pope. "He rose, and first he cast his mantle round, Chapman. "So up he rose, attired himself, and to his strong feet tied Derby. "He rose and o'er his body drew his vest, And underneath his well-turned feet he bound His sandals fair; then o'er his shoulders threw, Down reaching to his feet, a lion's skin, Tawny and vast; then grasped his ponderous spear." Now which is the best? Pope is mere sing-song, becoming even turgid in the second couplet, by the use of "spoils," "conceal'd," "held." Chapman is spirited and flowing, unusually literal, and so simple that it preserves fairly the dignity of the original. What shall we say of Lord Derby's? The word "vest" with its modern meaning insults the remote antiquity of the context. Then "sandals fair" (what an adjective to apply to sandals!) "down reaching," and "ponderous spear," with their little inversions and smooth meaningless words are an affectation of poetry. They are a specimen of the slang of rhymers. The word "vast" in the last line is as much out of place as "vest" in the first. Homer does not speak of a vast lion, or lion's skin. Does not the old Elizabethan "Homeri Metaphrastes" leave his rivals out of sight? We omit the other passage which we had marked to quote as illustrating this quality of Derby's translation. His fault in this respect is not that he is turgid like Pope, not that he is undignified and jogging like ballad poetry, not that he affects quaintness and a conversational style, like Mr. Newman, but that his poetry is commonplace, and often prosaic.-How terribly prosaic is the line "Where with his wife he late had converse held," as a translation of ape yuvaixi (Il. vi. 516): what a phrase for that charming ich means the talk of lovers or bosom friends. We have thus applied to Lord Derby's translation the four principal tests proposed by Mr. Arnold, finding that it has rapidity and directness of thought, but not, in the same degree, simplicity of style and the somewhat vague quality, of which we shall speak hereafter, nobleness. There is a remark incidentally made by Arnold upon which we have a word to say. It is this: "The translator must without scruple sacrifice, where it is necessary, verbal fidelity to his original, rather than run any risk of producing, by literalness, an odd and unnatural effect." This must be done in order to secure "an essential characteristic of Homer," plainness and naturalness of thought. We wish we had space for the page of admirable illustrations with which Arnold confirms this opinion. Let us slip in one specimen. "Instead of rendering μávu xas iπrous y Chapman's 'one-hoofed steeds,' or Mr. Newman's 'single-hoofed horses,' he must speak of horses in a way that surprises us as little as Shakespeare surprises us when he says, 'Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds."" True as this principle is, it may be carried too far. Homer's use of epithets is a striking peculiarity of his style, to which we cannot accustom ourselves, so that they cease to surprise us, even in the original, without an effort. Ought not the translation to preserve, so far as possible, this feature of style? and ought we not to be willing to make the same effort to get used to it, in English? We would not de |