[40]. I think he has mistaken the summit of the wave for a headland, and has made a single description into two, by the word Or: but I now confine my regard to the metre and general effect of the style.
[41]. Companion, in four syllables, is in Shakspeare’s style; with whom habitually the termination -tion is two.
[42]. By corrupting the past tenses of welisso into a false similarity to the past tenses of elelizo, the old editors superimposed a new and false sense on the latter verb; which still holds its place in our dictionaries, as it deceived the Greeks themselves.
[43]. That λλ in Attic was sounded like French l mouillée, is judged probable by the learned writer of the article L (Penny Cyclop.), who urges that μᾶλλον is for μάλιον, and compares φυλλο with folio, αλλο with alio, ἁλλ with sali.
[44]. Men who can bear ‘belch’ in poetry, nowadays pretend that ‘sputter’ is indelicate. They find Homer’s ἀποπτύει to be ‘elegant’, but sputter—not! ‘No one would guess from Mr Newman’s coarse phrases how elegant is Homer’!!
[45]. In a Note to my translation (overlooked by more than one critic) I have explained curl-ey’d, carefully, but not very accurately perhaps; as I had not before me the picture of the Hindoo lady to which I referred. The whole upper eyelid, when open, may be called the curl; for it is shaped like a buffalo’s horns. This accounts for ἑλικοβλέφαρος, ‘having a curly eyelid’.
[46]. I thought I had toned it down pretty well, in rendering it ‘O gentle friend’! Mr Arnold rebukes me for this, without telling me what I ought to say, or what is my fault. One thing is certain, that the Greek is most odd and peculiar.
[47]. In the noble simile of the sea-tide, quoted p. [138] above, only the two first of its five lines are to the purpose. Mr Gladstone, seduced by rhyme, has so tapered off the point of the similitude, that only a microscopic reader will see it.
[48]. It is very singular that Mr Gladstone should imagine such a poet to have no eye for colour. I totally protest against his turning Homer’s paintings into leadpencil drawings. I believe that γλαυκὸς is grey (silvergreen), χάροψ blue; and that πρασινὸς, ‘leek-colour’, was too mean a word for any poets, early or late, to use for ‘green’, therefore χλωρὸς does duty for it. Κῦμα πορφύρεον is surely ‘the purple wave’, and ἰοειδέα πόντον ‘the violet sea’.
[49]. He pares down ἑλκηθμοῖο (the dragging away of a woman by the hair) into ‘captivity’! Better surely is my ‘ignoble’ version: ‘Ere-that I see thee dragg’d away, and hear thy shriek of anguish’.