yet in the manuscript. He labored, meanwhile, on his translation of the
Iliad,--a youthful purpose which he did not see fulfilled till the year
1860, when he had already touched the Psalmist's limit of life. In this
translation he revived with admirable success an ancient species of
Armenian verse, which bears, in flexibility and strength, comparison with
the original Greek. Another of his great labors was the production of an
Armenian Grammar, in which he reduced to rule and order the numerous forms
of his native tongue, never before presented by one work in all its
eastern variety.

Padre Giacomo, to whose great kindness I am indebted for a biographic and
critical notice in writing of Father Pakraduni, considers the epic poem by
that scholar a far greater work than any of his philological treatises,
profound and thorough as they are. When nearly completed, this poem
perished in the same conflagration which consumed the Pindar and the
Rhetoric; but the poet patiently began his work anew, and after eight
years gave his epic of twenty books and twenty-two thousand verses to the
press. The hero of the poem is Haik, the first Armenian patriarch after
the flood, and the founder of a kingly dynasty. Nimrod, the great hunter,
drunk with his victories, declares himself a god, and ordains his own
worship throughout the Orient. Haik refuses to obey the commands of the
tyrant, takes up arms against him, and finally kills him in battle. "In
the style of this poem," writes Padre Giacomo, "it is hard to tell whether
to admire most its richness, its energy, its sweetness, its melancholy,
its freedom, its dignity, or its harmony, for it has all these virtues in
turn. The descriptive parts are depicted with the faithfulest pencil: the
battle scenes can only be matched in the Iliad."

Father Pakraduni returned, after twenty-five years' sojourn at
Constantinople, to publish his epic at San Lazzaro, where he still lives,