with scepticism--renouncing their own glory--denying
themselves. Therefore, it is always important, in civilized times, that
the majesty and might of poetry be sustained--surrounded by a body-guard
of opinion. In rude times it can take good care of itself. Then the king
walks among the people safe in their faith and love. Now you tremble to
diminish the reverence of that creation. But courage! All cannot read
Greek, and they are, as fellow men of Homer, entitled to as much of him as
they can get. Chapman, Pope, Cowper, Sotheby, all taken together, impress
an Englishman (Scotsman included) who is no Grecian, with a belief in
greatness. And then for the perpetual feeding of his faith he has his own
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton.

Translation, you see then, O gracious perusers! has divers motives. One is
ambitious. It is to help in giving the poet his due fame, and that is a
motive honourably sprung, since it comes of the belief that the poet
belongs to the species at large; and that accordingly his praise has not
had its full reverberation, until it has rebounded from all hearts. Of the
same impulse, but dealing justice in another direction, is the wish that
the less learned shall not, from that accident, forfeit their share of the
common patrimony; and that surely is among the best of all reasons. A
peculiar sort of zeal is to cultivate the vernacular literature by
transplanting the great works of other more happily cultivated languages,
as we naturalize fair and useful exotics. This is an early thought, and
goes off as the country advances. Probably the different reasons of
Translation would affect, even materially, the characters of Translation;
or at least, if they coexist, the predominance of one over the other
moving causes. The different purposes will even give different orders of
Translators. To undertake to aid in diffusing the version of Homer to the
ends of the West, would ask an Englishman tolerably confident in his own
powers. It breathed in the fiery spirit of George Chapman, who having
rolled out the Iliad in our stateliest numbers, the Odyssey in more
moderate strain, and finally dispatched the Homeric _Minora_, begins his
own Epilogue of three consecutive labours, with

"The work that I WAS BORN TO DO IS DONE!"

A little reflection will suggest to many a wishing Translator, that HE is
in danger of rather doing injustice to the celebrity of an admired
original. Incapables! refrain, desist, be dum