Extracts from Notices and Reviews from the English Quarterlies, &c.
"The merits of Lord Derby's translation may be summed up in one word: "it is eminently attractive; it is instinct with life; it may be read with fervent interest; it is immeasurably nearer than Pope to the text of the original. * * * We think that Lord Derby's translation will not only be read, but read over and over again. * * * Lord Derby has given to England a version far more closely allied to the original, and superior to any that has yet been attempted in the blank verse of our language."—Edinburgh Review, January 1865.
"As often as we return from even the best of them (other translations) to the translation before us, we find ourselves in a purer atmosphere of taste. We find more spirit, more tact in avoiding either trivial or conceited phrases, and altogether a presence of merits, and an absence of defects which continues, as we read, to lengthen more and more the distance between Lord Derby and the foremost of his competitors."—London Quarterly Review, January, 1865.
"While the versification of Lord Derby is such as Pope himself would have admired, his Iliad is in all other essentials superior to that of his great rival. For the rest, if Pope is dethroned what remains? * * * It is the Iliad we would place in the hands of English readers as the truest counterpart of the original, the nearest existing approach to a reproduction of that original's matchless feature."—Saturday Review.
"Among those curiosities of literature which are also its treasures, Lord Derby's translation of Homer must occupy a very conspicuous place. * * * Lord Derby's work is, on the whole, more remarkable for the constancy of its excellence and the high level which it maintains throughout, than for its special bursts of eloquence. It is uniformly worthy of itself and its author."—The Reader.
"Whatever may be the ultimate fate of this poem—whether it take sufficient hold of the public mind to satisfy that demand for a translation of Homer which we have alluded to, and thus become a permanent classic of the language, or whether it give place to the still more perfect production of some yet unknown poet—it must equally be considered a splendid performance; and for the present we have no hesitation in saying that it is by far the best representation of Homer's Iliad in the English language."
AMERICAN NOTICES.
The Publishers Circular says:—At the advanced age of sixty-five, the Earl of Derby, leader of the Tory party in England, has published a translation of Homer, in blank verse. Nearly all the London critics unite in declaring, with The Times, "that it is by far the best representation of Homer's 'Iliad' in the English language." His purpose was to produce a translation, and not a paraphrase—fairly and honestly giving the sense of every passage and of every line. Without doubt the greatest of all living British orators, he has now shown high poetic power as well as great scholarship.
From the New York World:—"The reader of English, who seeks to know what Homer really was, and in what fashion he thought and felt and wrote, will owe to Lord Derby his first honest opportunity of doing so. The Earl's translation is devoid alike of pretension and of prettiness. It is animated in movement, simple and representative to phraseology, breezy in atmosphere, if we may so speak, and pervaded by a refinement of taste which is as far removed from daintiness or effeminacy as can well be imagined."
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