Ulysses was shipwrecked on the shore of Phæacia and was succoured by the beautiful Nausicaa, the king's daughter. "CIRCE AND THE COMPANIONS OF ULYSSES," BY BRITON RIVIÈRE, R.A. Circe, the goddess, "fair-haired, a clever goddess, possessing human speech," changed twenty-two of the companions of Ulysses into pigs. Sarpedon's speech quoted a few days before he died by an English statesman who had played his part in arranging that Treaty of Paris which concluded the Seven Years' War. It was Lord Grenville, who at the time (1762) expressed in Homer's words the satisfaction he felt at helping to give his country peace. Could all our care elude the gloomy grave Which claims no less the fearful than the brave, In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war: Pope is too "literary" to convey any sense of the plain thinking and plain diction of Homer, but his translation has great merits, and the modern tendency is to grant it a much higher place than that assigned by Matthew Arnold. William Cowper, that gentle and perplexed spirit, has neither the force nor the rapidity of Pope driving his heroic couplet as a Greek hero his chariot, and he is at his best in "still life" descriptions. Lord Derby's Version Lord Derby had not a tithe of Cowper's poetic gift, but his faithful version of the Iliad, an honest and untiring attempt, as he said, "to infuse into an almost literal English version something of the spirit, as well as the simplicity, of the great original," has come much closer to success than any other. An excellent example of this translation is the moving passage in which Andromache sees from the walls of Troy the desecration of her husband's corpse by the triumphant Achilles-a dreadful scene which impresses us all the more because it follows so soon after the account of the poor lady's arrangements to provide Hector with a new embroidered robe and a hot bath on his safe return from battle: Then from the house she rushed, like one distract, We both were born alike; thou here in Troy, In Priam's royal palace; I in Thebes, By wooded Placos, in Eetion's house, Unhappier I! Would I had ne'er been born!" Only a poet with Swinburne's mastery of blank verse could hope to make a nobler version of the Iliad than Lord Derby's, and to come nearer (yet still how far away!) to achieving the miracle of pouring the old wine of Homer's poetry into new metrical bottles. A very interesting experiment in Homeric translations is the incomplete version of the Odyssey by William Morris, in which that entrancing poet displays his power of rapid and stirring narrative, his gift of creating a fresh, other-worldly atmosphere, and his sympathy with the saga spirit to great advantage. He shows us the Homeric scenes, it is true, through a misty glamour half-way between that of fairy-tales and that of the stark Northern epics. But, after all, the Homeric heroes were nearer to the Vikings in personality than any other adventurers of literature—they might almost be defined as types midway between the Northmen and the Normans, for the history revealed by picks rather than by pens clearly shows that they had entered into the material civilisation of others to possess it, and to enjoy a luxury and a lavishness which was in advance of their spiritual growth. The moment when the suitors of Penelope are visited by a sudden sense of impending doom, only understood by Theoclymenus, is thus presented by the author of The Earthly Paradise: So he spake; but Pallas Athene amidst the wooers' crew Were filled with tears, and the thoughts of their souls into sorrow Then the godlike Theoclymenus he spake to them and said: "Why bear ye this bale, ye unhappy? For your heads and your faces outright, And the knees that are beneath you are wrapt about in night, And blood the hall-walls staineth and the goodly panels streaks; the stead, As they went 'neath the dusk and the darkness, and the sun from the heavens is dead; And lo! how the mist of evil draws up and all about!" Certainly we get the same eerie impression of an omen, felt as a warning only by the righteous man, which is communicated in Homer's actual words. This Morrisian version is unequalled for the vigour and luminous quality of all its open-air passages. Some critics take exception to the occasional somewhat undignified and harsh renderings of stock epithets and are jarred when the man of many wiles is styled "the shifty." But it seems to have all the merits of Chapman's translation and to lack the latter's all-pervading fault—the teasing-out of the plain thought |