[30]. For instance; in a version (I believe, by the late Mr Lockhart) of Homer’s description of the parting of Hector and Andromache, there occurs, in the first five lines, but one spondee besides the necessary spondees in the sixth place; in the corresponding five lines of Homer there occur ten. See English Hexameter Translations, 244.
[31]. See for instance, in the Iliad, the loose construction of ὅστε, xvii. 658; that of ἴδοιτο, xvii. 681; that of οἵτε, xviii. 209; and the elliptical construction at xix. 42, 43; also the idiomatic construction of ἐγὼν ὅδε παρασχεῖν, xix. 140. These instances are all taken within a range of a thousand lines; anyone may easily multiply them for himself.
[32]. Our knowledge of Homer’s Greek is hardly such as to enable us to pronounce quite confidently what is idiomatic in his diction, and what is not, any more than in his grammar; but I seem to myself clearly to recognise an idiomatic stamp in such expressions as τολυπεύειν πολέμους, xiv. 86; φάος ἐν νήεσσιν θήῃς, xvi. 94; τιν’ οἴω ἀσπασίως αὐτῶν γόνυ κάμψειν, xix. 71; κλοτοπεύειν, xix. 149; and many others. The first-quoted expression, τολυπεύειν ἀργαλέους πολέμους, seems to me to have just about the same degree of freedom as the ‘jump the life to come’, or the ‘shuffle off this mortal coil’, of Shakspeare.
[33]. It must be remembered, however, that, if we disregard quantity too much in constructing English hexameters, we also disregard accent too much in reading Greek hexameters. We read every Greek dactyl so as to make a pure dactyl of it; but, to a Greek, the accent must have hindered many dactyls from sounding as pure dactyls. When we read αἰόλος ἵππος, for instance, or αἰγιόχοιο, the dactyl in each of these cases is made by us as pure a dactyl as ‘Tityre’, or ‘dignity’; but to a Greek it was not so. To him αἰόλος must have been nearly as impure a dactyl as ‘death-destined’ is to us; and αἰγιόχ nearly as impure as the ‘dressed his own’ of my text. Nor, I think, does this right mode of pronouncing the two words at all spoil the run of the line as a hexameter. The effect of αἰόλλος ἵππος (or something like that), though not our effect, is not a disagreeable one. On the other hand, κορυθαιόλος as a paroxytonon, although it has the respectable authority of Liddell and Scott’s Lexicon (following Heyne), is certainly wrong; for then the word cannot be pronounced without throwing an accent on the first syllable as well as the third, and μέγας κοῤῥυθαιόλλος Ἕκτωρ would have been to a Greek as intolerable an ending for a hexameter line as ‘accurst orphanhood-destined houses’ would be to us. The best authorities, accordingly, accent κορυθαίολος as a proparoxytonon.
[34]. Dr Hawtrey also has translated this passage; but here, he has not, I think, been so successful as in his ‘Helen on the walls of Troy’.
[35]. He attacks the same line also in p. [44]; but I do not claim this as a mark, how free I am from the fault.
[36]. If I had used such a double dative, as ‘to Peleus to a mortal’, what would he have said of my syntax?
[37]. Ballad-manner! The prevalent ballad-metre is the Common Metre of our Psalm tunes: and yet he assumes that whatever is in this metre must be on the same level. I have professed (Pref. p. x) that our existing old ballads are ‘poor and mean’, and are not my pattern.
[38]. He has also overlooked the misprint Trojans, where I wrote Troïans (in three syllables), and has thus spoiled one verse out of the five.
[39]. As a literary curiosity I append the sentence of a learned reviewer concerning this metre of Campbell. ‘It is a metre fit for introducing anything or translating anything; a metre that nothing can elevate, or degrade, or improve, or spoil; in which all subjects will sound alike. A theorem of Euclid, a leading article from the Times, a dialogue from the last new novel, could all be reduced to it with the slightest possible verbal alteration’. [Quite true of Greek hexameter or Shakspeare’s line. It is a virtue in the metres]. ‘To such a mill all would be grist that came near it, and in no grain that had once passed through it would human ingenuity ever detect again a characteristic quality’. This writer is a stout maintainer that English ballad metre is the right one for translating Homer: only, somehow, he shuts his eyes to the fact that Campbell’s is ballad metre! Sad to say, extravagant and absurd assertions, like these, though anonymous, can, by a parade of learning, do much damage to the sale of a book in verse.