be as idiomatic as he can be without ceasing to be noble. Therefore the idiomatic language of Shakspeare-such language as, "prate of his whereabout;" "jump the life to come;" "the damnation of his taking-off;" "his quietus make with a bare bodkin"should be carefully observed by the translator of Homer, although in every case he will have to decide for himself whether the use, by him, of Shakspeare's liberty, will or will not clash with his indispensable duty of nobleness. He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the Iliad itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible. No one could see this more clearly than Pope saw it: "This pure and noble simplicity," he says, "is nowhere in such perfection as in the Scripture and Homer:" yet even with Pope a woman is a "fair," a father is a "sire," and an old man a "reverend sage," and so on through all the phrases of that pseudo-Augustan, and most unbiblical, vocabulary. The Bible, however, is undoubtedly the grand mine of diction for the translator of Homer; and, if he knows how to discriminate truly between what will suit him and what will not, the Bible may afford him also invaluable lessons of style. I said that Homer, besides being plain in style and but I seem to myself clearly to recognise an idiomatic stamp in such expressions as τολυπεύειν πολέμους, xiv. 86; φάος ἐν νήεσσιν θήῃς, xvi. 94 ; τιν' οἴω ἀσπασίως αὐτῶν γόνυ κάμψειν, xix. 71; kλotoweúew, xix. 149; and many others. The first-quoted expression, τολυπεύειν ἀργαλέους πολέμους, seems to me to have just about the same degree of freedom as the "jump the life to come,” or the “shuffle off this mortal coil,” of Shakspeare. diction, was plain in the quality of his thought. It is possible that a thought may be expressed with idiomatic plainness, and yet not be in itself a plain thought. For example, in Mr. Clough's poem, already mentioned, the style and diction is almost always idiomatic and plain, but the thought itself is often of a quality which is not plain; it is curious. But the grand instance of the union of idiomatic expression with curious or difficult thought is in Shakspeare's poetry. Such, indeed, is the force and power of Shakspeare's idiomatic expression, that it gives an effect of clearness and vividness even to a thought which is imperfect and incoherent; for instance, when Hamlet says,— "To take arms against a sea of troubles,"— the figure there is undoubtedly most faulty, it by no means runs on four legs; but the thing is said so freely and idiomatically, that it passes. This, however, is not a point to which I now want to call your attention; I want you to remark, in Shakspeare and others, only that which we may directly apply to Homer. I say, then, that in Shakspeare the thought is often, while most idiomatically uttered, nay, while good and sound in itself, yet of a quality which is curious and difficult; and that this quality of thought is something entirely un-Homeric. For example, when Lady Macbeth says, "Memory, the warder of the brain, Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason A limbeck only,"— this figure is a perfectly sound and correct figure, no doubt; Mr. Knight even calls it a "happy" figure; but it is a difficult figure: Homer would not have used it. Again, when Lady Macbeth says,— "When you durst do it, then you were a man ; And, to be more than what you were, you would the thought in the two last of these lines is, when you seize it, a perfectly clear thought, and a fine thought; but it is a curious thought: Homer would not have used it. These are favourable instances of the union of plain style and words with a thought not plain in quality; but take stronger instances of this union,-let the thought be not only not plain in quality, but highly fanciful: and you have the Elizabethan conceits; you have, in spite of idiomatic style and idiomatic diction, everything which is most un-Homeric; you have such atrocities as this of Chapman : "Fate shall fail to vent her gall Till mine vent thousands." I say, the poets of a nation which has produced such conceit as that, must purify themselves seven times in the fire before they can hope to render Homer. They must expel their nature with a fork, and keep crying to one another night and day: "Homer not only moves rapidly, not only speaks idiomatically; he is, also, free from fancifulness." So essentially characteristic of Homer is his plainmess and naturalness of thought, that to the preserva tion of this in his own version 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. The double epithets so constantly occurring in Homer must be dealt with according to this rule; these epithets come quite naturally in Homer's poetry; in English poetry they, in nine cases out of ten, come, when literally rendered, quite unnaturally. I will not now discuss why this is so, I assume it as an indisputable fact that it is so; that Homer's μepóπwv ȧveрúшv comes to the reader as something perfectly natural, while Mr. Newman's "voice-dividing mortals" comes to him as something perfectly unnatural. Well then, as it is Homer's general effect which we are to reproduce, it is to be false to Homer to be so verbally faithful to him as that we lose this effect: and by the English translator Homer's double epithets must be, in many places, renounced altogether; in all places where they are rendered, rendered by equivalents which come naturally. Instead of rendering OÉTI Taνúñeπde by Mr. Newman's "Thetis trailing-robed," which brings to one's mind long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement, the translator must render the Greek by English words which come as naturally to us as Milton's words when he says, "Let gorgeous Tragedy With sceptred pall come sweeping by." Instead of rendering μώνυχας ἵππους by Chapman's "one-hoofed steeds," or Mr. Newman's "single-hoofed horses," he must speak of horses in a way which surprises us as little as Shakspeare surprises us when he says, "Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds." Instead of rendering peλindéa Ovμóv by "life as honey pleasant," he must characterise life with the simple pathos of Gray's "warm precincts of the cheerful day." Instead of converting ποιόν σε ἔπος φύγεν ἕρκος οδόντων ; into the portentous remonstrance, "Betwixt the outwork of thy teeth what word hath slipt?" he must remonstrate in English as straightforward as this of St. Peter, "Be it far from thee, Lord, this shall not be unto thee;" or as this of the disciples, "What is this that he saith, a little while? we cannot tell what he saith." Homer's Greek, in each of the places quoted, reads as naturally as any of those English passages the expression no more calls away the attention from the sense in the Greek than in the English. But when, in order to render literally in English one of Homer's double epithets, a strange unfamiliar adjective is invented, such as "voicedividing" for pépoys,-an improper share of the reader's attention is necessarily diverted to this ancillary word, to this word which Homer never intended should receive so much notice; and a total effect quite different from Homer's is thus produced. Therefore Mr. Newman, though he does not purposely import, like Chapman, conceits of his own into the Iliad, does actually import them; for the result of his singular diction is to raise ideas, and odd ideas, not raised by the corresponding diction in Homer; and Chapman himself does no more. Cowper says: I have cautiously avoided all terms of new invention, with an abundance of which persons of more |