The passage is rather fitted for a despairing mood of Arthur, in the
Idylls, than for the wife of the city clerk ruined by a pious rogue.

The Lucretius, later published, is beyond praise as a masterly study
of the great Roman sceptic, whose heart is at eternal odds with his
Epicurean creed. Nascent madness, or fever of the brain drugged by
the blundering love philtre, is not more cunningly treated in the mad
scenes of Maud. No prose commentary on the De Rerum Natura, however
long and learned, conveys so clearly as this concise study in verse
the sense of magnificent mingled ruin in the mind and poem of the
Roman.

The "Experiments in Quantity" were, perhaps, suggested by Mr Matthew
Arnold's Lectures on the Translating of Homer. Mr Arnold believed in
a translation into English hexameters. His negative criticism of
other translators and translations was amusing and instructive: he
had an easy game to play with the Yankee-doodle metre of F. W.
Newman, the ponderous blank verse of Cowper, the tripping and
clipping couplets of Pope, the Elizabethan fantasies of Chapman. But
Mr Arnold's hexameters were neither musical nor rapid: they only
exhibited a new form of failure. As the Prince of Abyssinia said to
his tutor, "Enough; you have convinced me that no man can be a poet,"
so Mr Arnold went some way to prove that no man can translate Homer.

Tennyson had the lowest opinion of hexameters as an English metre for
serious purposes.


"These lame hexameters the strong-wing'd music of Homer!"