“Jupiter and the gods deliberate in Olympus on the issue of the contest. Mars and Minerva decline personal interference, as well from the awe inspired by such mighty combatants as from previous ill-will towards both contending powers, in consequence of injuries inflicted by each on their divine persons or properties. A band of mosquitoes sound the war-alarum with their trumpets, and, after a bloody engagement, the frogs are defeated with great slaughter. Jupiter, sympathising with their fate, endeavours in vain by his thunders to intimidate the victors from further pursuit. The rescue of the frogs, however, is effected by an army of land-crabs, who appear as their allies, and before whom the mice, in their turn, are speedily put to flight.”
The Battle of the Frogs and Mice, then, is well described as the earliest and most successful extant specimen of the “mock-heroic,” the double object of which is, according to Barrow’s famous definition, to debase things pompous and elevate things mean. An amusing version of this Homeric jeu d’esprit was published in 1851 by an author who gave himself out as the “Singing Mouse,” “the last minstrel of his race.” “The theme,” he says, “belongs to that heroic age of which history has recorded that the very mountains laboured when a mouse was born.” The metre of this translation has been altered from the stately elegance of the original to one which is perhaps better fitted to the subject in itself than to its special object as a travestie on the epic style of the Iliad. The names of the heroes are happily rendered; but it will be seen that some difference exists between this author and the one just cited as to certain of the zoological terms in the poem.
THE MEETING
I
It fell on a day that a mouse, travel-spent,
To the side of a river did wearily win;
Of the good house-cat he had baffled the scent,
And he thirstily dipt his whiskered chin;
When, crouched in the sedge by the water’s brink,
A clamorous frog beheld him drink.