are as insolent as Claudio, as flushed with youth; his beggar-men
are brethren of Edie Ochiltree; his Nausicaa is sister to Rosalind,
with a different charm of stately purity in love. His enchantresses
hold us yet with their sorceries; his Helen is very Beauty: she has
all the sweetness of ideal womanhood, and her repentance is without
remorse. His Achilles is youth itself, glorious, cruel, pitiful,
splendid, and sad, ardent and loving, and conscious of its doom.
Homer, in truth, is to be matched only with Shakespeare, and of
Shakespeare he has not the occasional wilfulness, freakishness, and
modish obscurity. He is a poet all of gold, universal as humanity,
simple as childhood, musical now as the flow of his own rivers, now
as the heavy plunging wave of his own Ocean.

Such, then, as far as weak words can speak of him, is the first and
greatest of poets. This is he whom English boys are to be ignorant
of, if Greek be ousted from our schools, or are to know only in the
distorting mirror of a versified, or in the pale shadow of a prose
translation. Translations are good only as teachers to bring men to
Homer. English verse has no measure which even remotely suggests
the various flow of the hexameter. Translators who employ verse
give us a feeble Homer, dashed with their own conceits, and moulded
to their own style. Translators who employ prose "tell the story
without the song," but, at least, they add no twopenny "beauties"
and cheap conceits of their own.

I venture to offer a few examples of original translation, in which
the mannerisms of poets who have, or have not, translated Homer, are
parodied, and, of course (except in the case of Pope), exaggerated.
The passage is the speech of the Second-sighted Man, before the
slaying of the wooers in the hall:-