are of the same east; the Cyclops, Melanthius, or thoughts, is the true sublime of Don Quixote. and Irus, descend even to droll characters; and How far unfit it is for epic poetry, appears in its the scenes that appear throughout are generally being the perfection of the mock epic. It is so far of the comic kind; banquets, revels, sports, loves, from being the sublime of tragedy, that it is the and the pursuit of a woman. cause of all bombast; when poets, instead of beFrom the nature of the poem, we shall forming (as they imagine) constantly lofty, only prean idea of the style. The diction is to follow the images, and to take its colour from the complection of the thoughts. Accordingly the Odyssey is not always clothed in the majesty of verse proper to tragedy, but sometimes descends into the plainer narrative, and sometimes even to that familiar dialogue essential to comedy. However, where it cannot support a sublimity, it always preserves a dignity, or at least a propriety.

There is a real beauty in an easy, pure, perspicuous description, even of a low action. There are numerous instances of this both in Homer and Virgil: and, perhaps, those natural passages are not the least pleasing of their works. It is often the same in history, where the representations of common, or even domestic things, in clear, plain, and natural words, are frequently found to make the liveliest impression on the reader.

The question is, how far a poet, in pursuing the description or image of an action, can attach himself to little circumstances, without vulgarity or trifling? what particulars are proper, and enliven the image; or what are impertinent, and clog it? In this matter painting is to be consulted, and the whole regard had to those circumstances which contribute to form a full, and yet not a confused, idea of a thing.

Epithets are of vast service to this effect, and the right use of these is often the only expedient to render the narration poetical.

The great point of judgment is to distinguish when to speak simply, and when figuratively: but whenever the poet is obliged by the nature of his subject to descend to the lower manner of writing, an elevated style would be affected, and therefore ridiculous; and the more he was forced upon figures and metaphors to avoid that lowness, the more the image would be broken, and consequently

obscure.

One may add, that the use of the grand style on little subjects is not only ludicrous, but a sort of transgression against the rules of proportion and mechanics: it is using a vast force to lift a feather.

I believe, now I am upon this head, it will be found a just observation, that the low actions of life cannot be put into a figurative style, without being ridiculous, but things natural can. Metaphors raise the latter into dignity, as we see in the Georgics: but throw the former into ridicule, as in the Lutrin. I think this may very well be accounted for laughter implies censure; inanimate and irrational beings are not objects of censure; therefore they may be elevated as much as you please, and no ridicule follow: but when rational beings are represented above their real character, it becomes ridiculous in art, because it is vicious in morality. The bees in Virgil, were they rational beings, would be ridiculous by having their actious and manners represented on a level with creatures so superior as men; since it would imply folly or pride, which are the proper objects of ridicule.

The use of pompous expressson for low actions

serve throughout a painful equality of fustian: that continued swell of language (which runs indiscriminately even through their lowest characters, and rattles like some mightiness of meaning in the most indifferent subjects) is of a piece with that perpetual elevation of tone which the players have learned from it, and which is not speaking, but vociferating.

There is still more reason for a variation of style in epic poetry than in tragic, to distinguish be tween that language of the gods proper to the Muse who sings, and is inspired: and that of men who are introduced speaking only according to nature. Further, there ought to be a difference of style observed in the speeches of human persons, and those of deities; and again, in those which may be called set harangues, or orations, and those which are only conversation or dialogue. Homer has more of the latter than any other poet: what Virgil does by two or three words of narration, Homer still performs by speeches: not only replies, but even rejoinders are frequent in him, a practice almost unknown to Virgil. This renders his poems more animated, but less grave and majestic, and consequently necessitates the frequent use of a lower style. The writers of Tragedy lie under the same necessity, if they would copy nature; whereas that painted and poetical diction, which they perpetually use, would be improper even in orations designed to move with all the arts of Rhetoric: this is plain from the practice of Demosthenes and Cicero; and Virgil in those of Drances and Turnus gives an eminent example, how far removed the style of them ought to be from such an excess of figures and ornaments; which indeed fits only that language of the gods we have been speaking of, or that of a Muse under inspiration.

To read through a whole work in this strain, is like travelling all along the ridge of a hill; which is not half so agreeable as sometimes gradually to rise, and sometimes gently to descend, as the way leads, and as the end of the journey di

rects.

Indeed the true reason that so few poets have imitated Homer in these lower parts, has been the extreme difficulty of preserving that mixture of ease and dignity essential to them. For it is as hard for an epic poem to stoop to the narrative with success, as for a prince to descend to be familiar, without diminution to his greatness.

The sublime style is more easily counterfeited than the natural; something that passes for it, or sounds like it, is common in all false writers: but nature, purity, perspicuity, and simplicity, never walk in the clouds; they are obvious to all capacities; and where they are not evident, they do not exist.

The most plain narration not only admits of these, and of harmony, (which are all the qualities of style) but it requires every one of them to render it pleasing. On the contrary, whatever pretends to a share of the sublime, may pass, notwithstanding any defects in the rest; nay,

sometimes without any of them, and gain the admiration of all ordinary readers.

⚫ Homer, in his lowest narrations or speeches, is ever easy, flowing, copious, clear and harmonious. He shows not less invention, in assembling the humbler, than the greater, thoughts and images; nor less judgment, in proportioning the style and the versification to these, than to the other. Let it be remembered, that the same genius that soared the highest, and from whom the greatest models of the sublime are divided, was also he who stooped the lowest, and gave to the simple narrative its utmost perfection. Which of these was the harder task to Homer himself I cannot pretend to determine; but to his translator I can affirm (however unequal all his imitations must be) that of the latter has been more difficult.

and a heap of rubbish another. The imitators of Milton, like most other imitators, are not copies but caricaturas of their original; they are a hundred times more obsolete and cramp than he, and equally so in all places: whereas it should have been observed of Milton, that he is not lavish of his exotic words and phrases every where alike, but employs them much more where the subject is marvellous, vast, and strange, as in the scenes of Heaven, Hell, Chaos, &c. than where it is turned to the natural and agreeable, as in the pictures of Paradise, the loves of our first parents, entertainments of angels, and the like. In general, this unusual style better serves to awaken our ideas in the descriptions and in the imaging and picturesque parts, than it agrees with the lower sort of narrations, the character of which is sim

Whoever expects here the same pomp of verse,plicity and purity. Milton has several of the and the same ornaments of diction, as in the Iliad, he will, and he ought to be, disappointed. Were the original otherwise, it had been an offence against nature; and were the translation so, it were an offence against Homer, which is the same thing.

It must be allowed that there is a majesty and harmony in the Greek language, which greatly | contribute to elevate and support the narration. But I must also observe, that this is an advantage grown upon the language since Homer's time: for things are removed from vulgarity by being out of use; and if the words we could find in any present language were equally sonorous or musical in themselves, they would still appear less poetical and uncommon than those of a dead one, from this only circumstance, of being in every man's mouth. I may add to this another disadvantage to a translator, from a different cause: Homer seems to have taken upon him the character of an historian, antiquary, divine, and professor of arts and sciences, as well as a poet. In one or other of these characters he descends into many particularities, which as a poet only perhaps he would have avoided. All these ought to be preserved by a faithful translator, who in some measure takes the place of Homer; and all that can be expected from him is to make them as poetical as the subject will bear. Many arts therefore are requisite to supply these disadvantages, in order to dignify and solemnize these plainer parts, which hardly admit of any poetical

ornaments.

Some use has been made to this end of the style of Milton. A just and moderate mixture of old words may have an effect like the working of old abbey stones into a building, which I have sometimes seen, to give a kind of venerable air, and yet not destroy the neatness, elegance, and equality, requisite to a new work; I mean, without rendering it too unfamiliar, or remote from the present purity of writing, or from that ease and smoothness which onght always to accompany narration or dialogue. In reading a style judiciously antiquated, one finds a pleasure not unlike that of travelling on an old Roman way: but then the road must be as good, as the way is ancient; the style must be such in which we may evenly proceed, without being put to short stops by sudden abruptnesses, or puzzled by frequent turnings and transpositions. No man delights in furrows and stumbling-blocks: and let our love to antiquity be ever so great, a fine ruin is one thing,

latter, where we find not an antiquated, affected, or uncouth word, for some hundred lines together; as in his fifth book, the latter part of the eighth, the former of the tenth and eleventh books, and in the narration of Michael in the twelfth. I wonder indeed that he, who ventured contrary to the practice of all other epic poets, to imitate Homer's lownesses in the narrative, should not also have copied his plainness and perspicuity in the dramatic parts: since in his speeches (where clearness above all is necessary) there is frequently such transposition and forced construction, that the very sense is not to be discovered without a second or third reading: and in this, certainly he ought to be no example.

To preserve the true character of Homer's style in the present translation, great pains have been taken to be easy and natural. The chief merit I can pretend to is, not to have been carried into a more plausible and figurative manner of writing, which would better have pleased all readers, but the judicious ones. My errours had been fewer, had each of those gentlemen who joined with me shown as much of the severity of a friend to me, as I did to them, in a strict animadversion and correction. What assistance I received from them, was made known in general to the public in the original proposals for this work, and the particulars are specified at the conclusion of it; to which I must add (to be punctually just) some part of the tenth and fifteenth books. The reader will now be too good a judge, how much the greater part of it, and consequently of its faults, is chargeable upon me alone. But this I can with integrity affirm, that I have bestowed as much time and pains upon the whole, as were consistent with the indispensable duties and cares of life, and with that wretched state of health which God has been pleased to make my portion. At least, it is a pleasure to me to reflect, that I have introduced into our language this other work of the greatest and most ancient of poets, with some dignity; and I hope, with as little disadvantage as the Iliad. And if, after the unmerited success of that translation, any one will wonder why I would enterprise the Odyssey; I think it sufficient to say, that Homer himself did the same, or the world would never have seen it.

I designed to have ended this postscript here: but since I am now taking my leave of Homer, and of all controversy relating to him, I beg leave to be indulged if I make use of this last oppor

tunity to say a very few words about some reflections which the late Madam Dacier bestowed on the first part of my preface to the Iliad, and which she published at the end of her translation of that poem1.

To write gravely an answer to them, would be too much for the reflections; and to say nothing concerning them, would be too little for the author. It is owing to the industry of that learned lady, that our polite neighbours are become acquainted with many of Homer's beauties, which were hidden from them before in Greek and in Eustathius. She challenges on this account a particular regard from all the admirers of that great poet; and I hope that I shall be thought, as I mean, to pay some part of this debt to her memory in what I am now writing.

Had these reflections fallen from the pen of an ordinary critic, I should not have apprehended their effect, and should therefore have been silent concerning them but since they are Madam Dacier's, I imagine that they must be of weight; and in a case where I think her reasoning very bad, I respect her authority.

I have fought under Madam Dacier's banner, and have waged war in defence of the divine Homer against all the heretics of the age. And yet it is Madam Dacier who accuses me, and who accuses me of nothing less than betraying our common cause. She affirms that the most declared enemies of this author have never said any thing against him more injurious or more unjust than I. What must the world think of me, after such a judgment passed by so great a critic; the world, who decides so often, and who examines so seldom; the world, who even in matters of literature is almost always the slave of authority? Who will suspect that so much learning should mistake, that so much accuracy should be misled, or that so much candour should be biassed?

All this however has happened; and Madam Dacier's criticisms on my preface flow from the very same errour, from which so many false criticisms of her countrymen upon Homer have flowed, and which she has so justly and so severely reproved; I mean, the errour of depending on injurious and unskilful translations.

An indifferent translation may be of some use, and a good one will be of a great deal. But I think that no translation ought to be the ground of criticism, because no man ought to be condemned upon another man's explanation of his meaning: could Homer have had the honour of explaining his, before that august tribunal where Monsieur de la Motte presides, I make no doubt but he had escaped many of those severe animadversions with which some French authors have loaded him, and from which even Madam Dacier's translation of the Iliad could not preserve him.

How unhappy was it for me, that the knowledge of our island-tongue was as necessary to Madam Dacier in my case, as the knowledge of Greek was to Monsieur de la Motte in that of our great author; or to any of those whom she styles blind censurers, and blames for condemning what they did not understand..

I may say with modesty, that she knew less of my true sense from that faulty translation of part Second edition, à Paris, 1719.

of my preface, than those blind censurers might have known of Homer's even from the translation of la Valterie, which preceded her own.

It pleased me however to find, that her ob jections were not levelled at the general doctrine, or at any essentials of my preface, but only at a few particular expressions. She proposed little more than (to use her own phrase) to combat two or three similies; and I hope that to combat simile is no more than to fight with a shadow, since a simile is no better than the shadow of an argument.

She lays much weight where I laid but little, and examines with more scrupulosity than I writ, or than perhaps the matter requires.

These unlucky similies, taken by themselves, may perhaps render my meaning equivocal to an ignorant translator; or there may have fallen from my pen some expressions, which, taken by themselves likewise, may to the same person have the same effect. But if the translator had been master of our tongue, the general tenour of my argument, that which precedes and that which follows the passages objected to, would have sufficiently determined him as to the precise meaning of them : and if Madam Dacier had taken up her pen a little more leisurely, or had employed it with more temper, she would not have answered paraphrases of her own, which even the translation will not justify, and which say, more than once, the very contrary to what I have said in the passages themselves.

If any person has curiosity enough to read the whole paragraphs in my preface, or some mangled parts of which these reflections are made, he will easily discern that I am as orthodox as Madam Dacier herself in those very articles on which she treats me like an heretic: he will easily see that all the difference between us consists in this, that I offer opinions, and she delivers doctrines; that my imagination represents Homer as the greatest of human poets, whereas in hers he was exalted above humanity; infallibility and impeccability were two of his attributes. There was therefore no need of defending Homer against me, who, (if I mistake not) had carried my admiration of him as far as it can be carried, without giving a real occasion of writing in his defence,

After answering my harmless similies, she proceeds to a matter which does not regard so much the honour of Homer, as that of the times he lived in; and here I must confess she does not wholly mistake my meaning, but I think she mistakes the state of the question. She had said the manners of those times were so much the better, the less they were like ours. I thought this required a little qualification I confessed that in my opinion the world was mended in some points, such as the custom of putting whole nations to the sword, condemning kings and their families to perpetual slavery, and a few others. Madam Dacier judges otherwise in this; but as to the rest, particularly in preferring the simplicity of the ancient world to the luxury of ours, which is the main point contended for, she owns we agree. This I thought was well; but I am so unfortunate that this too is taken amiss, and called adopting, or (if you will) stealing her sentiment. The truth is, she might have said her words, for I used them on purpose, being then professedly citing from her: though

I might have done the same without intending that compliment, for they are also to be found in Eustathius, and the sentiment I believe is that of all mankind. I cannot really tell what to say to this whole remark; only that in the first part of it, Madam Dacier is displeased that I do not agree with her, and in the last that I do: but this is a temper which every polite man should overlook in a lady.

takes which no context can redress; as where she makes Eustathius call Cratisthenes the Phliasian, Callisthenes the Physician. What a triumph might some slips of this sort have afforded to Homer's, hers, and my enemies, from which she was only screened by their happy ignorance! How unlucky had it been, when she insulted Mr. de la Motte for omitting a material passage in the speech of Helen to Hector', Iliad vi. if some champion for the moderns had by chance understood so much Greek, as to whisper him, that there was no such passage in Homer?

in mine.

To punish my ingratitude, she resolves to expose my blunders, and selects two which I suppose are the most flagrant, out of the many for which she could have chastised me. It happens Our concern, zeal, and even jealousy, for our that the first of these is in part the translator's, great author's honour were mutual, our endeavours to advance it were equal, and I have as and in part her own, without any share of mine: she quotes the end of a sentence, and he puts in often trembled for it in her hands, as she could French what I never wrote in English: "Homer," It was one of the many reasons I had to I said, "opened a new and boundless walk for his wish the longer life of this lady, that I must cerimagination, and created a world for himself in tainly have regained her good opinion, in spite of the invention of fable;" which he translates," Ho-all misrepresenting translators whatever. I could not have expected it on any other terms than mere crea pour son usage un monde mouvant, en being approved as great, if not as passionate, an inventant la fable." admirer of Homer as herself. For that was the first condition of her favour and friendship; othermeant by Homer's invention of fable, it is after-wise not one's taste alone, but one's morality had been corrupted, nor would any man's religion have wards particularly distinguished from that extensive sense in which she took it, by these words. been suspected, who did not implicitly believe in an author whose doctrine is so conformable to "If Homer was not the first who introduced the deities (as Herodotus imagines) into the religion of Greece, he seems the first who brought them into a system of machinery for poetry."

Madam Dacier justly wonders at this nonsense As to what I in me; and I, in the translator.

Holy Scripture. However, as different people have different ways of expressing their belief, some purely by public and general acts of worship, others by a reverend sort of reasoning and inquiry about the grounds of it; it is the same in admiration, some prove it by exclamations, others by respect.

The other blunder she accuses me of is, the mistaking a passage in Aristotle, and she is pleased to send me back to this philosopher's treatise of I have observed that the loudest huzzas Poetry, and to her preface on the Odyssey, for Now though I am saucy given to a great man in triumph, proceed not my better instruction. enough to think that one may sometimes differ from his friends but the rabble; and as I have from Aristotle without blundering, and though I fancied it the same with the rabble of critics, a am sure one may sometimes fall into an errour by desire to be distinguished from them has turned following him servilely; yet I own, that to quote me to the more moderate, and, I hope, more any author for what he never said, is a blunder; rational method. Though I am a poet, I would (but, by the way, to correct an author for what not be an enthusiast; and though I am an Enhe never said, is somewhat worse than a blunder.)glishman, I would not be furiously of a party. I am far from thinking myself that genius, upon My words were these: "As there is a greater variety of characters in the Iliad than in any other whom, at the end of these remarks, Madam Dapoem, so there is of speeches. Every thing in it cier congratulates my country: one capable of has manners, as Aristotle expresses it; that is, "correcting Homer, and consequently of reformevery thing is acted or spoken: very little passes ing mankind, and amending this constitution." in narration." She justly says, that "Every thing It was not to Great Britain this ought to have which is acted or spoken, has not necessarily man- been applied, since our nation has one happiness ners merely because it is acted or spoken." Agreed: for which she might have preferred it to her own, but I would ask the question, whether any thing that, as much as we abound in other miserable 'can have manners which is neither acted nor misguided sects, we have at least none of the spoken? If not, then the whole Iliad being almost blasphemers of Homer. We stedfastly and unanispent in speech and action, almost every thing in mously believe, both his poem, and our constituit has manners, since Homer has been proved be- tion, to be the best that ever human wit invented: fore, in a long paragraph of the preface, to have that the one is not more incapable of amendment than the other; and (old as they both are) we excelled in drawing characters and painting manhers, and indeed his whole poem is one continued despise any French or Englishman whatever, who shall presume to retrench, to innovate, or to make occasion of showing this bright part of his talent. the least alteration in either. Far therefore from the genius for which Madam Dacier mistook me, my whole desire is but to preserve the humble character of a faithful translator, and a quiet subject.

To speak fairly, it is impossible she could read even the translation, and take my sense so wrong as she represents it; but I was first translated ignorantly, and then read partially. My expression indeed was not quite exact; it should have been," Every thing has manners, as Aristotle calls them." But such a fault methinks might have been spared, since if one was to look with that disposition she discovers towards me, even on her own excellent writings, one might find some mis