LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 243 



Chapman here is truer to his master, and the motion is in the 

 verse itself. Lord Derby s is description, and not picture. 

 1 Monsters of the deep is an example of the hackneyed peri 

 phrases in which he abounds, like all men to whom language is 

 a literary tradition, and not a living gift of the Muses. * Lash 

 is precisely the wrong word. Chapman is always great at sea. 

 Here is another example from the Fourteenth Book : 



And as, when with unwieldly waves the great seafbrefeels winds 

 That both ways murmur, and no way her certain current finds. 

 But pants and swells confusedly, here goes, and there will stay, 

 Till on it air casts one firm wind, and then it rolls away. 



Observe how the somewhat ponderous movement of the first 

 verse assists the meaning of the words. 



He is great, too, in single phrases and lines : 



And as, from top of some steep hill, the Lightener strips a clpuc , 

 ven, in whose delightsome light _ 

 towers, and temples cheer the sight. 



And lets a, great sky out of Heaven, in whose delightsome light _ 

 All prominent foreheads, forests, towers, and temples cheer the si 



(Book XVI. v. 286. 



The lion lets his rough brows down so low they hide his eyes ; 

 the flames wrastle in the woods ; rude feet dim the day with 

 a fog of dust ; and so in a hundred other instances. 



For an example of his more restrained vigour, take the speech 

 of Sarpedon in the Twelfth Book of the Iliad, and for poetic 

 beauty, the whole story of Ulysses and Nausikaa in the Odyssey. 

 It was here that Keats made himself Grecian and learned to 

 versify. 



Mr. Hooper has done his work of editing well. But he has 

 sometimes misapprehended his author, and distorted his mean 

 ing by faulty punctuation. In one of the passages already cited, 

 Mr. Hooper s text stands thus : Lest I be prejudiced with 

 opinion, to dissent, of ignorance, or singularity. All the commas, 

 which darken the sense, should be removed. Chapman meant 

 to say, Lest I be condemned beforehand by people thinking I 

 dissent out of ignorance or singularity. (Iliad, Vol. I. p. 23.) 

 So on the next page the want of a hyphen makes nonsense : 

 And saw the round coming [round-coming] of this silver bow of 

 our Phoebus, that is, the crescent coming to the full circle. In 

 the translations, too, the pointing needs reformation now and 

 then, but shows, on the whole, a praiseworthy fidelity. We will 

 give a few examples of what we believe to be errors on the part 

 of Mr. Hooper, who, by the way, is weakest on points which 

 concern the language of Chapman s day. We follow the order 

 of the text as most convenient. 



R 2 



