[50]. He means ours for two syllables. ‘Swiftness of ours’ is surely ungrammatical. ‘A galley of my own’ = one of my own galleys; but ‘a father of mine’, is absurd, since each has but one father. I confess I have myself been seduced into writing ‘those two eyes of his’, to avoid ‘those his two eyes’: but I have since condemned and altered it.
[51]. Of course no peculiarity of phrase has the effect of peculiarity on a man who has imperfect acquaintance with the delicacies of a language; who, for instance, thinks that ἑλκηθμὸς means δουλεία.
[52]. Ἐλλὸς needs light and gives none. Benfey suggests that it is for ἐνεὸς, as ἄλλος, alius, for Sanscrit anya. He with me refers ἔλλοψ to λέπω. Cf. squamigeri in Lucretius.
[53]. I do not see that Mr Arnold has any right to reproach me, because he does not know Spenser’s word ‘bragly’ (which I may have used twice in the Iliad), or Dryden’s word ‘plump’, for a mass. The former is so near in sound to brag and braw, that an Englishman who is once told that it means ‘proudly fine’, ought thenceforward to find it very intelligible: the latter is a noble modification of the vulgar lump. That he can carp as he does against these words and against bulkin (= young bullock) as unintelligible, is a testimony how little I have imposed of difficulty on my readers. Those who know lambkin cannot find bulkin very hard. Since writing the above, I see a learned writer in the Philological Museum illustrates ἴλη by the old English phrase ‘a plump of spears’.
[54]. I observe that Lord Lyttelton renders Milton’s dapper elf by ῥαδινὰ, ‘softly moving’.
[55]. Mr Arnold calls it an unfortunate sentence of mine: ‘I ought to be quaint; I ought not to be grotesque’. I am disposed to think him right, but for reasons very opposite to those which he assigns. I have ‘unfortunately’ given to querulous critics a cue for attacking me unjustly. I should rather have said: ‘We ought to be quaint, and not to shrink from that which the fastidious modern will be sure to call grotesque in English, when he is too blunted by habit, or too poor a scholar to discern it in the Greek’.
[56]. ‘It is the fact, that scholars of fastidious refinement, but of a judgment which I think far more masculine than Mr Arnold’s, have passed a most encouraging sentence on large specimens of my translation. I at present count eight such names’.—‘Before venturing to print, I sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children would accept my verses. I could boast how children and half-educated women have extolled them, how greedily a working man has inquired for them, without knowing who was the translator’.—Mr Newman’s Reply, pp. [113], [124], supra.
[57]. ‘O for the fields of Thessaly and the streams of Spercheios! O for the hills alive with the dances of the Laconian maidens, the hills of Taygetus’!—Georgics, ii. 486.
[58]. Iliad, xvii, 216.
[59]. Purgatory, xxiii, 124.