these poems would be incredible to a reader of mere modern translations. His almost Greek zeal for the honour of his heroes is only paralleled by that fierce spirit of Hebrew bigotry with which Milton, as if personating one of the zealots of the old Law, clothed himself when he sat down to paint the acts of Samson against the uncircumcised. The great obstacle to Chapman's translations being read is their unconquerable quaintness. He pours out in the same breath the most just and natural and the most violent and forced expressions. But passion (the all in all of poetry) is every where present, raising the low, dignifying the mean, and putting sense into the absurd."* Soon after the Restoration appeared the version of John Ogilby, adorned with elaborate engravings to hide the poverty of its diction. It is said to have taken the fancy of the young Pope, and first inspired him with a relish for poetry, and perhaps for the poetry of Homer in particular. Pope's taste was, however, too correct to allow him to regard such a scribbler with other feelings than those of contempt; yet if Ogilby were ambitious of posthumous fame, he might well have thanked his stars that he had fallen under Pope's eye of scorn, and thus escaped the still harder fate which Johnson had unjustly feared for Boswell," that he had lost his only chance of immortality by not being alive when the Dunciad was written." Impartial time has consigned to the same oblivion the work of a far greater man; for probably the majority of our readers are unaware that the whole Iliad and Odyssey have been translated by Thomas Hobbes. We may feel an interest in it as the perhaps unrivalled labour of fourscore years and seven; but it was not for the philosopher of Malmesbury to feel the touching beauty of those exquisite pictures of early Greek life, conceived in a spirit so opposite to the freezing selfishness of his narrow creed. We shall not easily recognise the lament of sad Andromache thus travestied: And we have only to carry our search further to find all around us fresh grounds to support an indictment for murder. Yet it is but fair to quote the close of his preface, which startles us by speaking of this great labour as if it had been merely designed as a lure to call off the falcons from a more important quarry: "But howsoever I defend Homer, I aim not thereby at any reflection upon the following translation. Why, then, did I write it? Because I had nothing else to do. Why publish it? Because I thought it might take off my adversaries from showing their folly upon my more serious writings, and set them upon my verses to show their wisdom." Next among our translators stands the great name of John Dryden, from whose pen we have the first Iliad and the parting of Hector and Andromache, published about 1698. Pope has accorded to it the praise of a generous rival: "Had he translated the whole, I should no more have thought of attempting Homer after him than Virgil; his version of whom, notwithstanding some human errors, is the most noble and spirited I know in any language." Posterity will hardly, perhaps, deplore that the unfinished work of Dryden left room for Pope. Both versions, indeed, are of the same character, both equally wide of the simple grandeur of the original; but of the two, Dryden is decidedly, on the whole, inferior. It would seem, indeed, that Pope did not always thus distrust his power to rival Dryden as a translator, inasmuch as he had at one time intended to print together, for comparison, four translations of the first Iliad-his own, and those of Dryden, Maynwaring, and Tickell. This last appeared in 1715, at the same time with the earlier part of Pope's version, and was pronounced by Addison to have more of Homer in it than Pope's had,--as, indeed, it easily might. However this may be, its appearance caused some alienation of friendship; for though Addison had been one of those who had encouraged Pope to the task, Pope believed,-and, we fear, not without reason, that he traced under the name of Tickell the hand of Addison. Few Pope's Iliad was completed by 1720, and was followed in 1725 by the Odyssey, in which he was assisted by Fenton and Broome. In an age when musical flow of rhythm was more valued than true poetic fire and rugged energy, we need not wonder that Chapman and all his successors were dethroned, and that Pope reigned supreme in the world of letters. perhaps were sufficiently competent Grecians to care to compare him closely with the original; indeed, the only really great scholar then living was Bentley, whose opinion is well known: "It is a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but do not call it Homer." Pope reigned without a rival for more than sixty years, till Cowper appeared in the field to contest his claim. Far as Cowper has excelled Pope in fidelity, in real correctness of taste and appreciation of the Homeric simplicity, the brilliancy of the elder poet has still held its own in popular estimation against the ponderous and often disjointed rhythm of his really far greater successor. Cowper has shown the strength and weakness of the Miltonic blank verse, as Pope had shown those of the decasyllable couplet; and we believe a preference has grown up for a freer metre, such as Chapman's (in the Iliad), which Charles Lamb pronounced "capable of all sweetness and grandeur. Cowper's ponderous blank verse detains you every step with some heavy Miltonism; Chapman gallops off with you at his own free pace."* We have the same freedom of metre in Dr. Maginn's very spirited ballads from the Odyssey, and a still greater freedom has been claimed by Mr. F. W. Newman; while the other metres have yet found their advocates, the decasyllable couplet having been chosen by Mr. Sotheby (1831), and the Miltonic blank verse by Mr. Wright, who closes our list. This catalogue, though it may be far from exhaustive, contains the names of no less than fifteen authors, most of them otherwise known to fame, and some among the greatest names in the history of our literature, who have endeavoured to supply the English reader with a metrical version of all or part of the Homeric poems. It may seem strange that so many should have attempted the same task, and stranger still that, after all their labours, a satisfactory translation should still be thought an impossibility. At any rate, this lengthened review of the labours of the past will not have been thrown away on our readers, if it has suggested the propriety of criticising a new translation, not by an arbitrary standard of ideal perfection, but by comparison with its actual competitors. Yet we feel that one only of the two whom we have chosen as our special subject can be thus relatively estimated. Mr. Newman is a revolutionist in the principles on which his translation is constructed, and has scarcely any thing in common with any predecessor except Chapman, and differs too much even from him to be fairly commensurable; while to place him side by side with Pope, Cowper, or Sotheby, would be to subject him to a comparison which must necessarily do him an injustice. With their elegant flowing lines neither his verse nor his diction has any pretensions to compare; but he has departed from their standard deliberately, feeling that it is not by following in their footsteps that he can hope to avoid their failures. We propose, therefore, after a short statement of the principles on which he has proceeded, to select * Letters, by Talfourd, i. p. 236. a few passages which our readers may place side by side with the Greek alone, and determine whether the object at which he aims is of sufficient importance, and has been sufficiently realised, to be worthy of the sacrifices which have been made to reach it. The preface explains the grounds for the adoption of that peculiar metre which forms one of his distinguishing characteristics. Firstly, he was led (by reasons with which we cordially agree) to prefer a ballad metre of some kind to that of either Pope or Cowper. "The style of Homer is garrulous, abounding with formulas, redundant in particles and affirmatory interjections, as also in grammatical connectives of time, place, and argument. In all these respects it is similar to the old English ballad, and in sharp contrast to the polished style of Pope, Sotheby, and Cowper. Indeed, the Homeric line itself is composed of two shorter lines, with three beats in each, and is undoubtedly founded on 'ditty' or sing-song, like our own ballad. On the contrary, the verse with five accents, which Pope, Cowper, Sotheby use, is adapted only to the terse, polished, oratorical or philosophical poetry of a later age. In such a metre (and peculiarly without rhyme) a high subject is necessary, and an artificial, if not an ornamental, style; even with tender sentiments, simplicity in it is not easily borne, unless there is something elevated or rare in the thoughts, while to be homely and prosaic, even for a few lines, is offensive. Shakespeare knew this so well, that he chooses rather to break into plain prose than put common thought into five-foot metre. Indeed, with this metre the instinct of every translator at once sacrifices as inadmissible all the repetitions of epithets, half lines, and whole lines, which so characterise the Greek epic. So glaring a proof of the incongruity of their form might have suggested that the mischief must go far deeper, and that they sacrifice inner qualities of the original life as well as external badges." Secondly, a ballad metre might be composed of systems of either four or three beats, or a combination of both; or, to illustrate by an example familiar to most readers, it might resemble either the long, short, or common measure of our ordinary hymn-books: and of these three alternatives, after repeated trials, the last was chosen. Thirdly, the exigencies of rhyme, as had been shown even in the case of Chapman, positively forbid faithfulness, enforcing often the adoption of inappropriate words, and making it necessary to spin out or unduly condense the ideas to bring the lines into couplets. Rhyme, then, must at all hazards be abandoned, and thus the metre assumed a completely new character, and failed to satisfy the ear, till the expedient of adding an unaccented syllable to the second line in each couplet was devised, and thus at last a result produced which Mr. Newman considered satisfactory, and which coincides exactly with the modern Greek epic. In the choice of words and expressions he has studied to attain "a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while remaining easily intelligible;" to prefer Saxon to Latinised words; to be quaint without being grotesque. Generally he dissents strongly from the dogma that the reader, if possible, should be lulled into the illusion that he is reading, not a translation, but an original poem. Mr. Newman's aim is the opposite to this,-to give his work as much as possible the character of a translation, as little as possible the character of an original poem; "to retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as he is able, with the greater care the more foreign it may happen to be, whether it be matter of taste, intellect, or morals." Let us now instance in some selected passages the result of all these principles. As our space compels us to select but few, they shall be such as in their original are among the best known and most celebrated in the whole compass of the Iliad, requesting the reader to compare the translations closely with the Greek version, which we will not insult him by supposing that he does not possess. "Thus saying, gallant Hector stretch'd ‘O Jupiter, and other gods, Thus saying, in the mother's arms And she her own dear child receiv'd Laughing amid her tears; the which And soothing her with hand and voice, Hither he hied him, pitying his arms toward his infant. the Argives, by the Trojans |