remedy now is needed. She can now work her deliverance for herself, and she no more heeds the hypocritical friendship of the Gaul than the open enmity of the Austrian. Before our eyes is growing up an Italian kingdom truer and freer than that of Charles and Otto, than that of Berenger and Hugh of Provence; and, with a slight change of name and style, we may apply to its first and chosen sovereign the words of the papal benediction to Charles himself. Not altogether for his own sake, not forgetting the tortuous and faithless policy which bartered away the old cradle of his house, still, as to the representative of Italian unity, we may say with heart and voice, "Victori Emmanueli, a Deo coronato, magno et pacifico Italorum Regi, Romanorum Imperatori futuro, vita et victoria!"

ART. II. THE ENGLISH TRANSLATORS OF HOMER. The Iliad of Homer, faithfully translated into unrhymed English metre. By F. W. Newman. London: Walton and Maberly, 1856.

The Iliad of Homer, translated into blank verse. By Ichabod Charles Wright, M.A., translator of Dante, late Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. Books I.-VI. Cambridge: Macmillan and Co. 1859.

WE have been told, on no less authority than that of Lemuel Gulliver, that, when the Laputan necromancer gratified him by summoning from the shades Homer, at the head of all his commentators, "it was soon discovered that he was a perfect stranger to all that numerous company, and had never seen or heard of them before;" and it was whispered, "that these commentators always kept in the most distant quarters from their principals in the lower world, through a consciousness of shame and guilt, because they had so horribly misrepresented their authors' meaning to posterity."

Had the great satirist been gifted with prophetic vision to reach to our own time, he might have seen much to make him modify this judgment, much on the other hand to steep his pen in yet deeper gall. Buttmann, Passow, and Nitsch need not perhaps have shrunk from looking their author in the face, as did Eustathius and Didymus; but the whole lower world would be scarce wide enough to find a lurking-place for those German critics who denied his individuality altogether, and deemed him the mere name for an imaginary compiler of a patchwork poem. What would Swift have said of the translators, especially

* Voyage to Laputa, ch. viii.

those of his own language? Little enough, we fear, and that little the reverse of complimentary; yet there existed then English versions which even now hold their own, and may probably never be wholly superseded; though no translator, either then or since, seems to have forced upon his successors the belief that it was either a hopeless or a needless task to attempt to tread again over the same well-worn ground. Even Chapman had his predecessor; but he improved him off the face of the earth his own archaic quaintness and Elizabethan conceits shocked the ears of the age of Dryden and Pope; their conceits, in turn, so far more false and frigid, their purpurei panni of laboured antithetical rhetoric, offended the simpler taste of Cowper; and Cowper in our own day has found his rivals, urged by the consciousness of a sounder scholarship or a more vigorous spirit, to strive to reproduce in stronger or more faithful colours the picture which seemed, despite all its merits, to be so feeble a copy of its great original. How far the last competitors in this field of fame have succeeded, it will be the object of the present article to show; but it may be well to preface the inquiry by a short historical sketch of the labours of past generations.

It would seem, as we have already said, that the honour of having been the first introducer of Homer to the English reader is not claimed by Chapman, as a translation of ten books of the Iliad from the French of M. Salel, by A. H. (Arthur Hall, Esq.), of Grantham, appeared in 1581. The author compliments the distinguished translators of the day,-Golding, Phaier, and others, and states that he began the work about 1563, under the advice of Roger Ascham. We have never seen the book, which is exceedingly rare; and we are indebted for these facts to the introduction to the last new edition of Chapman, whence we also learn that Chapman himself published parts of the Iliad in 1598, and the complete version probably in 1611; the first twelve books of the Odyssey in 1614, and the whole Iliad and Odyssey collected into one volume in 1616. His work, once also rare, is now again within reach of all, having been twice lately republished, the Iliad by Dr. Taylor, in 1843, and the whole by Mr. Hooper in 1858. We intend to bring before our readers several specimens, which will give the reader a far better idea of his merits than any cut-and-dried criticism that we could offer. Indeed, it would be hard to improve on the well-known judgment of Charles Lamb: "He would have made a great epic poet, if, indeed, he had not abundantly shown himself to be one; for his Homer is not so properly a translation as the stories of Achilles and Ulysses re-written. The earnestness and passion which he has put into every part of

these poems would be incredible to a reader of mere modern translations. His almost Greek zeal for the honour of his heroes is only paralleled by that fierce spirit of Hebrew bigotry with which Milton, as if personating one of the zealots of the old Law, clothed himself when he sat down to paint the acts of Samson against the uncircumcised. The great obstacle to Chapman's translations being read is their unconquerable quaintness. He pours out in the same breath the most just and natural and the most violent and forced expressions. But passion (the all in all of poetry) is every where present, raising the low, dignifying the mean, and putting sense into the absurd."*

Soon after the Restoration appeared the version of John Ogilby, adorned with elaborate engravings to hide the poverty of its diction. It is said to have taken the fancy of the young Pope, and first inspired him with a relish for poetry, and perhaps for the poetry of Homer in particular. Pope's taste was, however, too correct to allow him to regard such a scribbler with other feelings than those of contempt; yet if Ogilby were ambitious of posthumous fame, he might well have thanked his stars that he had fallen under Pope's eye of scorn, and thus escaped the still harder fate which Johnson had unjustly feared for Boswell," that he had lost his only chance of immortality by not being alive when the Dunciad was written."

Impartial time has consigned to the same oblivion the work of a far greater man; for probably the majority of our readers are unaware that the whole Iliad and Odyssey have been translated by Thomas Hobbes. We may feel an interest in it as the perhaps unrivalled labour of fourscore years and seven; but it was not for the philosopher of Malmesbury to feel the touching beauty of those exquisite pictures of early Greek life, conceived in a spirit so opposite to the freezing selfishness of his narrow creed. We shall not easily recognise the lament of sad Andromache thus travestied:

"My dear, you'll by your courage be undone,
And this your son a wretched orphan be;
The Greeks at once on you alone shall fall;
And then a woful widow shall be I ;

And have no comfort in the world at all,

But live in misery and wish to die.

Father and mother have they left me none

Now, Hector, you my father are and brother;
Husband and mother, in thee I confide;
For pitie's sake, then, on this turret stay,
Lest fatherless your son, I widow be.”

*

Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, i. p. 91.

And we have only to carry our search further to find all around us fresh grounds to support an indictment for murder. Yet it is but fair to quote the close of his preface, which startles us by speaking of this great labour as if it had been merely designed as a lure to call off the falcons from a more important quarry: "But howsoever I defend Homer, I aim not thereby at any reflection upon the following translation. Why, then, did I write it? Because I had nothing else to do. Why publish it? Because I thought it might take off my adversaries from showing their folly upon my more serious writings, and set them upon my verses to show their wisdom."

Next among our translators stands the great name of John Dryden, from whose pen we have the first Iliad and the parting of Hector and Andromache, published about 1698. Pope has accorded to it the praise of a generous rival: "Had he translated the whole, I should no more have thought of attempting Homer after him than Virgil; his version of whom, notwithstanding some human errors, is the most noble and spirited I know in any language." Posterity will hardly, perhaps, deplore that the unfinished work of Dryden left room for Pope. Both versions, indeed, are of the same character, both equally wide of the simple grandeur of the original; but of the two, Dryden is decidedly, on the whole, inferior. It would seem, indeed, that Pope did not always thus distrust his power to rival Dryden as a translator, inasmuch as he had at one time intended to print together, for comparison, four translations of the first Iliad-his own, and those of Dryden, Maynwaring, and Tickell. This last appeared in 1715, at the same time with the earlier part of Pope's version, and was pronounced by Addison to have more of Homer in it than Pope's had,--as, indeed, it easily might. However this may be, its appearance caused some alienation of friendship; for though Addison had been one of those who had encouraged Pope to the task, Pope believed,-and, we fear, not without reason,-that he traced under the name of Tickell the hand of Addison.

Pope's Iliad was completed by 1720, and was followed in 1725 by the Odyssey, in which he was assisted by Fenton and Broome. In an age when musical flow of rhythm was more valued than true poetic fire and rugged energy, we need not wonder that Chapman and all his successors were dethroned, and that Pope reigned supreme in the world of letters. Few perhaps were sufficiently competent Grecians to care to compare him closely with the original; indeed, the only really great scholar then living was Bentley, whose opinion is well known: "It is a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but do not call it Homer." Pope reigned without a rival for more than sixty years, till

Cowper appeared in the field to contest his claim. Far as Cowper has excelled Pope in fidelity, in real correctness of taste and appreciation of the Homeric simplicity, the brilliancy of the elder poet has still held its own in popular estimation against the ponderous and often disjointed rhythm of his really far greater successor. Cowper has shown the strength and weakness of the Miltonic blank verse, as Pope had shown those of the decasyllable couplet; and we believe a preference has grown up for a freer metre, such as Chapman's (in the Iliad), which Charles Lamb pronounced "capable of all sweetness and grandeur. Cowper's ponderous blank verse detains you every step with some heavy Miltonism; Chapman gallops off with you at his own free pace.' We have the same freedom of metre in Dr. Maginn's very spirited ballads from the Odyssey, and a still greater freedom has been claimed by Mr. F. W. Newman; while the other metres have yet found their advocates, the decasyllable couplet having been chosen by Mr. Sotheby (1831), and the Miltonic blank verse by Mr. Wright, who closes our list.

This catalogue, though it may be far from exhaustive, contains the names of no less than fifteen authors, most of them otherwise known to fame, and some among the greatest names in the history of our literature, who have endeavoured to supply the English reader with a metrical version of all or part of the Homeric poems. It may seem strange that so many should have attempted the same task, and stranger still that, after all their labours, a satisfactory translation should still be thought an impossibility. At any rate, this lengthened review of the labours of the past will not have been thrown away on our readers, if it has suggested the propriety of criticising a new translation, not by an arbitrary standard of ideal perfection, but by comparison with its actual competitors. Yet we feel that one only of the two whom we have chosen as our special subject can be thus relatively estimated. Mr. Newman is a revolutionist in the principles on which his translation is constructed, and has scarcely any thing in common with any predecessor except Chapman, and differs too much even from him to be fairly commensurable; while to place him side by side with Pope, Cowper, or Sotheby, would be to subject him to a comparison which must necessarily do him an injustice. With their elegant flowing lines neither his verse nor his diction has any pretensions to compare; but he has departed from their standard deliberately, feeling that it is not by following in their footsteps that he can hope to avoid their failures. We propose, therefore, after a short statement of the principles on which he has proceeded, to select * Letters, by Talfourd, i. p. 236.