Concerning my reply to Mr. Marston’s charges, I am in receipt of the Literary World of May 2nd, which over his name has the following:
“Dear Sir:—I will not waste your space replying at length to Mrs. Gallup, except to ask her where she has replied to my article in The Nineteenth Century for January, and to my letters in The Times?
“In your columns and in the May number of The Pall Mall Magazine Mrs. Gallup says she has elsewhere replied to my request for an explanation of the fact that many passages in what she says is Bacon’s translation of Homer are identical with Pope’s Homer published more than 200 years afterward!...
“In a letter in The Times Mrs. Gallup did suggest that Bacon and Pope had used some edition of Homer unknown to any one else.”...
In the above we note the strange inconsistency of Mr. Marston, for my letter published in the Times did not “suggest” or even refer to any edition of Homer whatever. His reference is to a paragraph in my reply (printed herewith) to his baseless aspersions, and shows conclusively that he had read my refutation, and knew that in the article submitted to his magazine and rejected I had “elsewhere replied” to his request.
In the article next preceding Mr. Marston’s letter, “Reviewer” also states: “Now as to Homer, I have read Mrs. Gallup’s 'answer’ to Mr. Marston,” etc.
This indicates that both Mr. Marston and “Reviewer” had examined my article, and they comment upon specific portions of it before it has been published, while ordinary courtesy should have withheld criticism, at least until the article had appeared in print.
It may not be inopportune to report at this time the results of researches made for me at the British Museum and elsewhere, since Mr. Marston’s malicious charge of “paraphrasing Pope’s translation of the Iliad” was made. Fourteen translations in Latin, French, German, Italian and English, published before 1620, were carefully examined for the reading in the disputed passages. Bacon’s “impatient arrow” is “eager shaft” in Chapman’s translation, and “long distance shots” is rendered “his hitting so far off,” the Greek words conveying the same idea to these two minds. Mr. Marston matched Bacon’s “cold Dodona” against Pope’s “cold Dodona,” but Hobbes has “Dodona cold,” and a modern Greek scholar renders it “chilly Dodona.” He also pairs “rocky Aulis” with the same in Pope, but gives it as the literal translation also; and he places Bacon’s “he leapt to the ground” opposite Pope’s “leaps upon the ground,” while it is more like the line of Hobbes, “he leapt to land.” Another renders this “he leap’d to the land,” and still another, “he leaped upon the earth.”
The examination also developed the fact that Pope’s original MSS., preserved at the Museum, have closer resemblances to Bacon’s Argument of the Iliad than are found in Pope’s published work. This is very significant, and in itself refutes the charge, as I have never seen the MSS., and the first edition of my book containing the Argument of the Iliad was published the year before I went to England to pursue the work at the British Museum.
In Bacon’s Argument we find: