bear, for your knees in the
night,
And your heads and your faces, are shrouded, and clamour that knows
not delight
Rings, and your cheeks are begrutten, and blood is besprent on the
walls,
Blood on the tapestry fair woven, and barrow-wights walk in the halls.
Fetches and wraiths of the chosen of the Norns, and the sun from the
lift
Shudders, and over the midgarth and swan's bath the cloud-shadows
drift."

It may be argued that, though this is perhaps a translation, it is not
English, never was, and never will be. But it is quite as like Homer as
the performance of Pope.

Such as these, or not so very much better than these as might be wished,
are our efforts to translate Homer. From Chapman to Avia, or Mr. William
Morris, they are all eminently conscientious, and erroneous, and futile.
Chapman makes Homer a fanciful, euphuistic, obscure, and garrulous
Elizabethan, but Chapman has fire. Pope makes him a wit, spirited,
occasionally noble, full of points, and epigrams, and queer rococo
conventionalisms. 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 nov