what I call a loose and idiomatic grammar. In writing a regular and literary style, one would in the fourth line have to repeat, before "leave" the words "that ye" from the second line, and to insert the word "do;" and in the eighth line one would not use such an expression as "he was given a voice." But I will make one general remark on the character of my own translations, as I have made so many on that of the translations of others. It is, that over the graver passages there is shed an air somewhat too strenuous and severe, by comparison with that lovely ease and sweetness which Homer, for all his noble and masculine way of thinking, never loses.

Here I stop. I have said so much, because I think that the task of translating Homer into English verse both will be re-attempted, and may be reattempted successfully. There are great works composed of parts so disparate that one translator is not likely to have the requisite gifts for poetically rendering all of them. Such are the works of Shakspeare, and Goethe's Faust; and these it is best to attempt to render in prose only. People praise Tieck and Schlegel's version of Shakspeare: I, for my part, would sooner read Shakspeare in the French prose translation, and that is saying a great deal; but in the German poets' hands Shakspeare so often gets, especially where he is humorous, an air of what the French call niaiserie and can anything be more un-Shakspearian than that? Again; Mr. Hayward's prose translation of the first part of Faust-so good that it makes one regret Mr. Hayward should have

abandoned the line of translation for a kind of literature which is, to say the least, somewhat slight —is not likely to be surpassed by any translation in verse. But poems like the Iliad, which, in the main, are in one manner, may hope to find a poetical translator so gifted and so trained as to be able to learn that one manner, and to reproduce it. Only, the poet who would reproduce this must cultivate in himself a Greek virtue by no means common among the moderns in general, and the English in particular, -moderation. For Homer has not only the English vigour, he has the Greek grace; and when one observes the boistering, rollicking way in which his English admirers—even men of genius, like the late Professor Wilson-love to talk of Homer and his poetry, one cannot help feeling that there is no very deep community of nature between them and the object of their enthusiasm. "It is very well, my good friends," I always imagine Homer saying to them if he could hear them: "you do me a great deal of honour, but somehow or other you praise me too like barbarians." For Homer's grandeur is not the mixed and turbid grandeur of the great poets of the north, of the authors of Othello and Faust; it is a perfect, a lovely grandeur. Certainly his poetry has all the energy and power of the poetry of our ruder climates; but it has, besides, the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky.

"Multi, qui persequuntur me, et tribulant me: a testimoniis non declinavi."

BUFFON, the great French naturalist, imposed on himself the rule of steadily abstaining from all answer to attacks made upon him. "Je n'ai jamais répondu à aucune critique," he said to one of his friends who, on the occasion of a certain criticism, was eager to take up arms in his behalf; "je n'ai jamais répondu à aucune critique, et je garderai le même silence sur celle-ci." On another occasion, when accused of plagiarism, and pressed by his friends to answer, "Il vaut mieux," he said, "laisser ces mauvaises gens dans l'incertitude." Even when reply to an attack was made successfully, he disapproved of it, he regretted that those he esteemed should make it. Montesquieu, more sensitive to criticism than Buffon, had answered, and successfully answered, an attack made upon his great work, the Esprit des Lois, by the Gazetier Janséniste. This Jansenist Gazetteer was a periodical of those times,―a periodical such as other times, also, have occasionally seen,-very pretentious, very aggressive, and, when the point to be seized was at all a delicate one, very apt to miss it. "Notwithstanding this example," said Buffon,-who, as well as Montesquieu, had been attacked by the Jansenist Gazetteer," notwithstanding this example, I think I may promise my course will be different. I shall

not answer a single word."

And to any one. who has noticed the baneful effects of controversy, with all its train of personal rivalries and hatreds, on men of letters or men of science; to any one who has observed how it tends to impair, not only their dignity and repose, but their productive force, their genuine activity; how it always checks the free play of the spirit, and often ends by stopping it altogether; it can hardly seem doubtful, that the rule thus imposed on himself by Buffon was a wise one. His own career, indeed, admirably shows the wisdom of it. That career was as glorious as it was serene; but it owed to its serenity no small part of its glory. The regularity and completeness with which he gradually built up the great work which he had designed, the air of equable majesty which he shed over it, struck powerfully the imagination of his contemporaries, and surrounded Buffon's fame with a peculiar respect and dignity. "He is," said Frederick the Great of him, "the man who has best deserved the great celebrity which he has acquired." And this regularity of production, this equableness of temper, he maintained by his resolute disdain of personal controversy.

Buffon's example seems to me worthy of all imitation, and in my humble way I mean always to follow it. I never have replied, I never will reply, to any literary assailant; in such encounters tempers are lost, the world laughs, and truth is not served. Least of all should I think of using this Chair as a place from which to carry on such a conflict. But when a learned and estimable man thinks he has

reason to complain of language used by me in this Chair, when he attributes to me intentions and feelings towards him which are far from my heart, I owe him some explanation,-and I am bound, too, to make the explanation as public as the words which gave offence. This is the reason why I revert once more to the subject of translating Homer. But being thus brought back to that subject, and not wishing to occupy you solely with an explanation which, after all, is Mr. Newman's affair and mine, not the public's, I shall take the opportunity,-not certainly to enter into any conflict with any one,-but to try to establish our old friend, the coming translator of Homer, yet a little firmer in the positions which I hope we have now secured for him; to protect him against the danger of relaxing, in the confusion of dispute, his attention to those matters which alone I consider important for him; to save him from losing sight, in the dust of the attacks delivered over it, of the real body of Patroclus. He will, probably, when he arrives, requite my solicitude very ill, and be in haste to disown his benefactor; but my interest in him is so sincere that I can disregard his probable ingratitude.

First, however, for the explanation. Mr. Newman has published a reply to the remarks which I made on his translation of the Iliad. He seems to think that the respect which at the outset of those remarks I professed for him must have been professed ironically; he says that I use "forms of attack against him. which he does not know how to characterise;" that I