_Practical Teacher_, may adopt my version. Its origin and history is
this: finding winter evenings in the country wearisome to my homeflock,
I used to read to them profusely and discursively. Amongst other books,
a literary daughter suggested Pope's Homer; which, as I read, after a
little while, I found to be so very free and incorrect a translation (if
my memory served me rightly) that I resolved to see what I could do by
reading from the original Greek in its own (English) metre. I soon found
it quite easy to be both terse and literal; and having rhythm only to
care for without the tag of rhyme, I soon pleased my hearers and in some
sort myself, reading "off the reel" directly from the Greek into the
English.

This version is still unblotted by printer's ink: if any compositor
pleases he is welcome to work on the copy; which I can supply gratis:
only I do not promise to do more than I have done, Book Alpha. Life is
too short for such literary playwork.

Here followeth a sample: quite literal: line for line, almost word for
word: my translation renders Homer exactly. I choose the short bit where
Thetis pleads with Jove for her irate son, because I am sure Tennyson
must have had this passage in his mind when he drew his word-picture of
Vivien with Merlin.

"But now at length the twelfth morn from the first had arrived;
and returning
Came to Olympus together the glorious band of immortals,
Zeus the great king at their head. And Thetis, remembering the
cravings
Of her own son, and his claims, uprose to the surface of ocean,
And through the air flew swift to high heaven, ascending Olympus.
There she found sitting alone on the loftiest peak of the mountain
All-seeing Zeus, son of Kronos, apart from the other celestials.
So she sat closely beside him, embracing his knees with her
left hand,
While with her right she handled his beard, and tenderly stroked it,
Whispering thus her prayer to Zeus, the great king, son of
Kronos," &c. &c.

Let that suffice with a _caetera desunt_.

I need not say that I have written innumerable other, translated pieces,
from earliest days of school exercises to these present. There is
scarcely a classic I have not so tampered with: and (though a poor
modern linguist) I have touched--with dictionary and other help, a few
bits of Petrarch, Dante, &c.; examples whereof may be seen in my "Modern
Pyramid," as already ment