re; and I cannot
help running over in my mind the long list of celebrated
writers, astonishing geniuses, Novels, Romances, Poems,
Histories, and dense Political Economy quartos, which,
compared with "Mrs. Leicester's School," will be remembered
as often and praised as highly as Wilkie's and Glover's
Epics and Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophies compared with
"Robinson Crusoe!"

In the "Adventures of Ulysses" Lamb sought to provide what he termed a
supplement to Fenelon's long-popular "Adventures of Telemachus." He
took the story from Chapman's translation of Homer's "Odyssey," that
translation which a few years later was to inspire John Keats with one
of his finest sonnets. In a preface, a model of concise expression,
the author of the tale explained:

By avoiding the prolixity which marks the speeches and the
descriptions in Homer, I have gained a rapidity to the
narration which I hope will make it more attractive, and
give it more the air of a romance, to young readers; though
I am sensible that, by the curtailment, I have sacrificed in
many places the manners to the passion, the subordinate
characteristics to the essential interests of the story. The
attempt is not to be considered as seeking a comparison with
any of the direct translations of the "Odyssey," either in
prose or verse; though if I were to state the obligations
which I have had to one obsolete version, I should run the
hazard of depriving myself of the very slender degree of
reputation which I could hope to acquire from a trifle like
the present undertaking.

If Chapman's translation of Homer was "obsolete" in 1808, it was yet
to be restored to the favour of readers, thanks to the loving homage
of Lamb and Keats. "Chapman is divine," wrote the author of the
"Adventures of Ulysses" to a friend, "and my abridgement has not quite
emptied him of his divinity." In his story Lamb shows how he had
recognized the moral value of the story of Ulysses, of "a brave man
struggling with adversity," but wisely leaves that moral to be
insensibly impressed upon the reader, for he not only refrained from
formulating a definite "moral" in such a case, but has explicitly
recorded his repugnance from the method.

VERSES

In "Poetry for Children" we have again a work for which brother and
sister were jointly responsible, and again--though we cannot exactly
allot th