quality of Homer's style being amplitude, not conciseness we want in the old minstrel that warrant which in other authors is generally esteemed necessary to justify the process of exsection. There is no recognisable difference of style between the passages cut out and those which are allowed to stand. The Homeric phraseology was, like the Homeric poetry, the common property of the people to whom it belonged, and in a particular manner the property of the order of minstrels, who used it not merely as a popular inheri tance, but as a professional accomplishment. Whatever these men wove into the tissue of the Homeric verse, they wove with the same thread, and they did so unconsciously, requiring no skill to forge what they knew by long practice, exactly as the Roman Popes know the style of the encyclical comminations which, from the time of Hildebrand downwards, have been in use to be fulminated over their flocks. What successive minstrels or rhapsodists may have interpolated into Homer, before the edition of Pisistratus, they did, for the most part, in so perfectly Homeric a vein, both as to style and matter, that it became impossible for the most cunning eye to separate the addition from the original. Neither were such interpolations forgeries, in the popular sense of that word; not, for instance, like the Shakspearian forgeries of the young London scrivener Ireland at the end of the last century; if they were not Homer's, they were at least. Homeric; they were plants growing in the same soil, sprung from the same seed, fed by the same dews, and blooming in the same sunshine. It must happen, therefore, that when a modern critic remodels the text of Homer, I do not say in the sweeping style of Köchly, but even in the moderate way of Bekker, he must generally proceed, not on grounds of proof, but on mere suspicion; and of criticism founded on

such principles, a sober man can only say, that if similar canons were applied by the judges in our criminal courts to decide the fate of the unfortunate persons brought before them, many an innocent man would be condemned.1

1 Köchly's grand style of exsec- | second; but amongst these the very tion will be best learned from Iliadis Carmina xvi. scholarum in usum (Lipsia, 1861). Bekker's more moderate process (Bonn, 1850) exhibits only ten lines cast out from the first book, and thirty or more from the

first is ver. 47 of the first book, exsected from the famous description of the descent of Apollo-a castration not certainly of a kind to inspire the reader with much faith in the surgical operations that are to follow

2 A

VOL. I.

DISSERTATION X.

ON POETICAL TRANSLATION, AND THE ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF HOMER.

TRANSLATORS and lexicographers are a class of literary workers that are apt to receive small praise and little glory in the book world; but for this want they are amply compensated, both by the rich harvest of improvement which their labour brings to themselves, and by its manifest utility to the great mass of mankind. They are a sort of roadmakers and bridge-builders in the great empire of human thought; men use them only as means for attaining an end, and, when the journey is over, readily forget by what kindly intervening hands they were led to the blazing fire, the comfortable bed, and the well-furnished board. But there are not wanting instances in which the middleman has attained more celebrity, and achieved a wider field of efficiency, than the principal whom he represents, as many a mere moneychanger has become wealthier than the merchant whose convenience he serves. The Old Testament Scriptures never exercised any influence beyond the narrow limits of Judea, till, under the second Ptolemy, they were translated into the current literary language of the ancient world; Luther's German Bible has stirred the wells of thought in hundreds

of thousands of hearts to whom the original Scriptures, and even the Latin translation of the Church, must have remained for ever inaccessible; the Gaelic Bible, at the present day, is the only standard of classicality in the venerable language to which it belongs; and Pope's Homer, with whatever brilliant defects studded, was at one time almost as generally read among the educated classes as the Bible; and if it is less read now, this is owing to a change in the spirit. of the age, and in the objects that excite public attention, not to any change in the verdict which criticism will ever pronounce on that work, as at once a piece of most elegant, vigorous, and effective English, and a most felicitous transference of the old Ionic version of the tale of Troy into the most polished style of English poetry in the eighteenth century. Translations, we may be assured, do even more than railways in bringing to some mutual understanding the tribes of men, sundered as they are by barriers of language, religion, and polity, much more difficult to pass than the highest Alps; and although a very warm enthusiasm for any foreign world of thought is seldom found to exist, except in those to whom the native dress of those foreign thoughts has become familiar, still translations are the great engines that first break down the walls of partition betwixt people and people, and enable thousands of intellectual brethren to shake hands who never could have seen faces by any other device.

Of all tasks, except that of driving learning into heads not willing to receive it, the work of translation has generally been considered the most irksome; and there is no denying that it is beset with very great difficulties. No doubt, the translator starts free from much labour which often sorely tries the original composer; he has neither materials to gather nor story to invent, nor parts to concatenate. An

DISSERTATION X.

ON POETICAL TRANSLATION, AND THE ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF HOMER.

TRANSLATORS and lexicographers are a class of literary workers that are apt to receive small praise and little glory in the book world; but for this want they are amply compensated, both by the rich harvest of improvement which their labour brings to themselves, and by its manifest utility to the great mass of mankind. They are a sort of roadmakers and bridge-builders in the great empire of human thought; men use them only as means for attaining an end, and, when the journey is over, readily forget by what kindly intervening hands they were led to the blazing fire, the comfortable bed, and the well-furnished board. But there are not wanting instances in which the middleman has attained more celebrity, and achieved a wider field of efficiency, than the principal whom he represents, as many a mere moneychanger has become wealthier than the merchant whose convenience he serves. The Old Testament Scriptures never exercised any influence beyond the narrow limits of Judea, till, under the second Ptolemy, they were translated into the current literary language of the ancient world; Luther's German Bible has stirred the wells of thought in hundreds