We have elsewhere noticed, 'pugilistic skill,' suggestions offers,' and a few others of the like kind; and we feel pretty confident that Lord Derby will agree with us, that logical and technical terms should, as far as possible, be avoided, and that abstract nouns are a very poor equivalent for concrete and sensuous expressions. Upon this ground, we venture to offer another rendering of the lines (Book ix. verse 63), ἀφρήτωρ, ἀθέμιστος, ἀνέστιός ἐστιν ἐκεῖνος, et cat., in place of 'Religious, social, and domestic ties Alike he violates who willingly Would court the horrors of internal strife.' 'Outcast from kindred, law, and hearth is he, Who sets his heart on fell internal strife.' At verse 553 we read, 'The sun now sunk beneath the ocean wave But on the Greeks the shades of darkness fell As we cannot say the sun is sunk, we must not use sunk as a past participle active. We can say come for being come, because the language allows, and indeed compels us to suppress the auxiliary being in the few words where having has not yet entirely displaced it. Thus we can use fallen, risen, come, gone, set, in an active sense; by which we express not that an object has fallen and the like, but that it is fallen, &c. But when we say sunk, we are using the passive voice: we mean that somebody has sunk him or it, and thus the participle sunk can only be used of that which some one else has sent below the surface, and not of that which has descended thither of its own accord. 'Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor' may be said of Lycidas, who was drowned, but cannot be said of the luminary to which he is compared. We also think that the concluding words have lost their force through transposition, and that it would be an improvement to condense the whole passage into something like the following attempt : The sun now sinking in the ocean drew The veil of Night o'er Earth; the Trojan host The conclusion of the 8th Book, with the exception of the two lines which are mentioned above as interpolated, is equal to any passage in the translation. The Laureate's version of the same passage is also very noble, but we must confess that the general general effect of it on ourselves is less Homeric. The whole of the 9th Book, which is one of the greatest in the work, has been rendered with admirable spirit. As examples of this we may point to the speech of Achilles, and to the passage in which Phoenix relates his own adventures, and the episode of Meleager. But we must notice that the expression δι ̓ Ἑλλάδος εὐρυχόροιο is not through the breadth of Greece,' but through wideextending Thessaly, which is the only sense in which Hellas was used in those days. 6 The 10th Book is especially interesting to us on account of the tradition preserved in the Venice Scholia, that it was composed by Homer as a separate poem, and afterwards incorporated by Pisistratus into the Iliad.' The mention of this anecdote would afford us a very handsome pretext for entering into the controversy touching the original condition of the Homeric There is but poems, but we spare the reader and ourselves. one point to which we would fain draw attention. If this fact is historical, as far as regards what Pisistratus did (and it rests upon just as good a foundation as the other doings of Pisistratus with regard to Homer), it follows that there was already an established continuity in the rest of the books, and that they existed as a whole before that age. It may be said that this wholeness was due to the decree of Solon, that the lays should be recited in their proper order, so that in the recitation (supposing always that this anecdote of Solon is not some orator's adaptation of the story of Pisistratus to a more popular character) this episode of the night-watch' had no place in the series. But even so, the continuity of the poem must have been a matter of independent tradition, and not inferred from the continuity of the subject, else why should the part in question have ever been omitted? To the question whether it is really by the author of the Iliad,' that is, whether it was written by the great master who combined all those scattered and rude legends about individual heroes into a single and wonderfully coherent On the one poem, it is very difficult to return an answer. hand we notice a great many words and some strange inflexions not to be found elsewhere in the 'Iliad,' and many of them not even in the Odyssey.' On the other hand, in the selection and grouping of the incidents, in the vividness of the narration, and in the characteristic propriety of the dialogue, it is inferior to no other book. To all these excellencies we think that Lord Derby has done justice; as, for instance, what can be more stately and Homeric than the commencement of the book. 'In night-long slumbers lay the other chiefs By By various cares oppress'd, sweet slumber fell. This deep humiliation Jove hath laid,' which does not render the sense of the original, we would propose 6 Whom Jove Even at our birth hath visited with grief.' At all events, some attempt should be made to express ÉTÌ yvoμévolo. It is evident even from the tense of in that γιγνομένοισιν. κακότητα is misfortune in general. In verse 128 we should prefer Though thou be angry, yet the word shall out.' In verses 181-3, σχέτλιός ἐσσι γεραιέ is well rendered 'Beshrew thy heart, old man!' but we cannot say as much of the translation of σὺ δ ̓ ἀμήχανός éooi yeparé, at the end of the same speech. We must, however, own ourselves fairly beaten in attempting to render the passage. Not so in verse 270, where we think that the pathos of the original will be better preserved by the version 'Divine Ulysses how should I forget?' The dodging to let Dolon pass is well expressed and clear, with the single exception of the words 'turn him toward the ships.' Dolon was already going in that direction, and the word εἰλεῖν, or rather εἴλειν (compare ἴλλειν), is used in the sense of urging or pressing. On the comparison of the mules outstripping the oxen Lord Derby says very justly, that it does not afford a very accurate criterion of the space interposed, which cannot be estimated without knowing the total distance within which the faster was to outstrip the slower team.' We can offer no solution of this difficulty either here or in the parallel parallel passage in the 'Odyssey,' Book viii. verse 124, unless by supposing that the measure to be understood is the plethrum, so that if the mules go twice as fast as the oxen, the start which the heroes give Dolon would be fifty feet; and this distance accords with the rest of the story. We must be brief in pointing out the few changes which we would fain suggest in the 11th Book, that we may leave ourselves space for some observations on the beginning of the 12th Book, and for a concluding specimen. Because bronze cannot be made iridiscent, and for other reasons too long to enumerate, we believe that the six serpents on the breastplate of Agamemnon were of iron tempered to a dark hue. Verse 163, 'And in the dust a headless block he rolled,' is surely not a faithful translation of · ὅλμον δ ̓ ὡς ἔσσευε κυλίνδεσθαι δι' ὁμίλου, which is to be understood of the head and not of the trunk, for what resemblance is there between the trundling of a saladbowl and the rolling of a man's body in the dust? On the words by Lucina sent,' in verse 311, we must observe that, though we entirely agree with Lord Derby as to his principle of rendering Greek proper names by their better-known Latin equivalents, and though Lucina has become familiar to us through Milton's line, we do not think that this form of the Latin Juno ought to supersede the μογοστόκοι εἰλείθυιαι of the Homeric creed. Why not call them 'the pain-engendering throes,' or if the personification is too bold, 'powers?' In verse 467 it will be sufficient to draw the translator's attention to the words 'increase the people's terror,' and to request him to compare them with the original. The best of us make these slips, and are thankful to have them pointed out. The beginning of the 12th Book is one of the most interesting passages in the poem, as affording at least some trace of the poet himself: 'While Hector liv'd, and Peleus' son his wrath But of the Trojans when the best had fall'n, Of Greeks, when some were slain, some yet surviv'd; And Greeks, embark'd, had ta'en their homeward way, To sap the wall by aid of all the streams Granicus, and Esepus Rhodius, Scamander's Scamander's stream divine, and Simoïs, On this an old grammarian remarks, that Homer must have lived soon after the Trojan war, or he would not have been at such pains to account for the destruction of the wall, if the length of time had been a sufficient cause of its disappearance. His second remark is much more sensible, that the wall had never existed at all save in Homer's imagination. Indeed there is no other way of explaining this singular break in the narrative, and this reference to a time outside the poem, but by supposing that this subject, so unimportant to us, had some special interest to the poet. Now if we assume that those before whom he was to recite in the first instance, the audience for whom his poem was in fact composed, were as well acquainted with the Troad and its topographical features as himself, nothing is more natural than that having invented an additional landmark, he should afterwards be at great pains to show how it had disappeared. But if he thus addressed himself to those who were familiar with the Simois, and the Scamander, and the barrow of Achilles, and the tomb of Ilus, and the plain of Troy surging up to a bank before it shelved down into the sea, the place which he lived in could not have been very far from those scenes, and the cities which he first visited professionally must have been those, to the inhabitants of which all these objects were familiar; that is, they must have been Æolian cities. We believe that the first and innermost circle of his admirers were the men to whom the peaks of the Trojan Ida were daily visible; and that having first succeeded with those for whom the poem had local charms, he betook himself further southward, and sought fresh admirers at the festivals of the Ionian towns. If the reader will take the trouble to compare this observation with the admirable account given by K. O. Müller (History of the Literature of Ancient Greece,' vol. i. pp. 58-64), he will see how far the one confirms the other, and how far it modifies it. The specimen which we shall select in order to give an agree able |