s, it seems
quite complete, and the chronological list of paintings and drawings is
really admirable. When this unfortunate 'Great Writers' Series comes to
an end, Mr. Anderson's bibliographies should be collected together and
published in a separate volume. At present they are in a very second-
rate company indeed.

Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. By Joseph Knight. 'Great Writers'
Series. (Walter Scott.)

MR. MORRIS'S ODYSSEY

(Pall Mall Gazette, April 26, 1887.)

Of all our modern poets, Mr. William Morris is the one best qualified by
nature and by art to translate for us the marvellous epic of the
wanderings of Odysseus. For he is our only true story-singer since
Chaucer; if he is a Socialist, he is also a Saga-man; and there was a
time when he was never wearied of telling us strange legends of gods and
men, wonderful tales of chivalry and romance. Master as he is of
decorative and descriptive verse, he has all the Greek's joy in the
visible aspect of things, all the Greek's sense of delicate and
delightful detail, all the Greek's pleasure in beautiful textures and
exquisite materials and imaginative designs; nor can any one have a
keener sympathy with the Homeric admiration for the workers and the
craftsmen in the various arts, from the stainers in white ivory and the
embroiderers in purple and fold, to the weaver sitting by the loom and
the dyer dipping in the vat, the chaser of shield and helmet, the carver
of wood or stone. And to all this is added the true temper of high
romance, the power to make the past as real to us as the present, the
subtle instinct to discern passion, the swift impulse to portray life.

It is no wonder the lovers of Greek literature have so eagerly looked
forward to Mr. Morris's version of the Odyssean epic, and now that the
first volume has appeared, it is not extravagant to say that of all our
English translations this is the most perfect and the most satisfying. In
spite of Coleridge's well-known views on the subject, we have always held
that Chapman's Odyssey is immeasurably inferior to his Iliad, the mere
difference of metre alone being sufficient to set the former in a
secondary place; Pope's Odyssey, with its glittering rhetoric and smart
antithesis, has nothing of the grand manner of the original; Cowper is
dull, and Bryant dreadful, and Worsley too full of Spenserian
prettinesses; while excellent though Messrs. Butcher and Lang's version
undoubtedly is in m