renchify'd notes, &c., in Pope's translation, and contrast
them with solemn weighty prefaces of Chapman, writing in full faith, as
he evidently does, of the plenary inspiration of his author--worshipping
his meanest scraps and relics as divine--without one sceptical misgiving
of their authenticity, and doubt which was the properest to expound
Homer to their countrymen. Reverend Chapman! you have read his hymn to
Pan (the Homeric)--why, it is Milton's blank verse clothed with rhyme.
Paradise Lost could scarce lose, could it be so accoutred.

I shall die in the belief that he has improved upon Homer, in the
Odyssey in particular--the disclosure of Ulysses of himself, to
Alcinous, his previous behaviour at the song of the stern strife arising
between Achilles and himself (how it raises him above the _Iliad_
Ulysses!) but you know all these things quite as well as I do. But what
a deaf ear old C. would have turned to the doubters in Homer's real
personality! They might as well have denied the appearance of J.C. in
the flesh.--He apparently believed all the fables of H.'s birth, &c.

Those notes of Bryant have caused the greatest disorder in my brain-pan.
Well, I will not flatter when I say that we have had two or three long
evening's _good reading_ out of your kind present.

I will say nothing of the tenderest parts in your own little volume, at
the end of such a slatternly scribble as this, but indeed they cost us
some tears. I scrawl away because of interruptions every moment. You
guess how it is in a busy office--papers thrust into your hand when your
hand is busiest--and every anti-classical disavocation.

[_Conclusion cut away_.]

[Sir Charles Abraham Elton (1778-1853) seems to have sent Lamb a number
of his books, principally his _Specimens of the Classical_ _Poets ...
from Homer to Tryphiodorus translated into English Verse_, Baldwin,
1814, in three volumes. Lamb refers first to the passage from Hesiod's
_Theogony_, and then to his _Works and Days_ (which Chapman
translated)--"Dispensation of Providence to the Just and Unjust."

Apollonius Rhodius was the author of _The Argonautics_. Lamb then passes
on to Virgil. For the death of Mezentius see the _Aeneid_, Book X., at
the end. The makers of broadsides had probably credited Dick Turpin with
a dying speech.

"Those notes of Bryant." Lamb possibly refers to Jacob Bryant's _Essay
on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer_, 1775, or his pamphlet on
the Troja