Cowper makes him slow,
lumbering, a Milton without the music. Maginn makes him pipe an
Irish jig:-
"Scarcely had she begun to wash
When she was aware of the grisly gash!"
Lord Derby makes him respectable and ponderous. Lord Tennyson makes
him not less, but certainly not more, than Tennysonian. Homer, in
the Laureate's few fragments of experiment, is still a poet, but he
is not Homer. Mr. Morris, and Avia, make him Icelandic, and
archaistic, and hard to scan, though vigorous in his fetters for all
that. Bohn makes him a crib; and of other translators in prose it
has been said, with a humour which one of them appreciates, that
they render Homer into a likeness of the Book of Mormon.
Homer is untranslatable. None of us can bend the bow of Eurytus,
and make the bow-string "ring sweetly at the touch, like the
swallow's song." The adventure is never to be achieved; and, if
Greek is to be dismissed from education, not the least of the
sorrows that will ensue is English ignorance of Homer.
THE LAST FASHIONABLE NOVEL
The editor of a great American newspaper once offered the author of
these lines a commission to explore a lost country, the seat of a
fallen and forgotten civilisation. It was not in Yucatan, or
Central Africa, or Thibet, or Kafiristan, this desolate region, once
so popular, so gaudy, so much frequented and desired. It was only
the fashionable novels of the Forties, say from 1835 to 1850, that I
was requested to examine and report upon.
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