as the loll and slap of billows in the hollow caverns of the sea.
As his lines swing in and roll and crash, they swell the soul in
you, and you hear and grow great on the rhythm of the eternal.
This though we really, I suppose, are quite uncertain as to the
pronunciation. But give the vowels merely a plain English value,
certain to be wrong, and you still have grand music. Perhaps
some of you have read Mathew Arnold's great essay _On Translating
Homer,_ and know the arguments wherewith wise Matthew exalts him.
A Mr. Newman had translated him so as considerably to out-Bottom
Bottom; and Arnold took up the cudgels--to some effect. Newman
had treated him as a barbarian, a primitive; Arnold argued that
it was Homer, on the contrary, who might have so looked on us.
There is, however, perhaps something to be said on Mr. Newman's
side. Homer's huge and age-long fame, and his extraordinary
virtues, were quite capable of blinding even a great critic to
certain things about him which I shall, with great timidity,
designate imperfections: therein following De Quincey, who read
Greek from early childhood as easily as English, and who, as a
critic, saw things sometimes. _Bonus dormitat Homerus,_ says
Horace; like the elder Gobbo, he "something smacked." He was
the product of a great creative force; which did not however
work in a great literary age: and all I am going to say is
merely a bearing out of this.

First there is his poverty of epithets. He repeats the same ones
over and over again. He can hardly mention Hector without
calling him _megas koruthaiolos Hector,_--"great glittering-
helmeted Hector"; or (in the genitive) _Hectoros hippodamoio_--
"of Hector the tamer of war-steeds." Over and over again we have
_anax andron Agamemnon;_ or "swift-footed Achilles." Over and