eal in such cases." It appears to us, that, on most of the points at
issue, the truth lies somewhere between the two disputants. We do not
think that Mr. Newman has made out his case that Homer was antiquated,
quaint, and even grotesque to the Greeks themselves because his cast of
thought and his language were archaic, or strange to them because he wrote
in a dialect almost as different from Attic as Scotch from English. The
Bible is as far from us in language and in the Orientalism of its thought
and expression as Homer was from them; yet we are so familiar with it that
it produces on us no impression of being antiquated or quaint, seldom of
being grotesque, and what is still more to the purpose, produces that
impression as little on illiterate persons to whom many of the words are
incomprehensible. So, too, it seems to us, no part of Burns is alien to a
man whose mother-tongue is English, in the same sense that some parts of
Beranger are; because Burns, though a North Briton, was still a Briton, as
Homer, though an Ionian, was still a Greek. We think he does prove that
neither Mr. Arnold nor any other scholar can form any adequate conception
of the impression which the poems of Homer produced either on the ear or
the mind of a Greek; but in doing this he proves too much for his own
case, where it turns upon the class of words proper to be used in
translating him. Mr. Newman says he sometimes used low words; and since
his theory of the duty of a translator is, that he should reproduce the
moral effect of his author,--be noble where he is noble, barbarous, if he
be barbarous, and quaint, if quaint,--so he should render low words by
words as low. But here his own dilemma meets him: how does he know that
Homer's words _did_ seem low to a Greek? We agree with him in refusing to
be conventional; so would Mr. Arnold; only one would call conventional
what the other would call elegant, the question again resolving itself
into one of personal taste. We agree with him also in his preference for
words that have it certain strangeness and antique dignity about them, but
think he should stop short of anything that needs a glossary. He might
learn from Chapman's version, however, that it is not the widest choice of
archaic words, but intensity of conception and phrase, that gives a poem
life, and keeps it living, in spite of grave defects. Where Chapman, in a
famous passage, ("Odyssey," v. 612,) tells us, that, when Ulysses crawled
ash