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rude, and harsh in the age of Anne. These great
translations must always live as English poems. As
transcripts of Homer they are like pictures drawn from a
lost point of view. Chaque siecle depuis le xvi a ue de ce
cote son belveder different. Again, when Europe woke to a
sense, an almost exaggerated and certainly uncritical
sense, of the value of her songs of the people, of all the
ballads that Herder, Scott, Lonnrot, and the rest
collected, it was commonly said that Homer was a
ballad-minstrel, that the translator must imitate the
simplicity, and even adopt the formulae of the ballad.
Hence came the renderings of Maginn, the experiments of Mr.
Gladstone, and others. There was some excuse for the error
of critics who asked for a Homer in ballad rhyme. The Epic
poet, the poet of gods and heroes, did indeed inherit some
of the formulae of the earlier Volks-lied. Homer, like the
author of The Song of Roland, like the singers of the
Kalevala, uses constantly recurring epithets, and repeats,
word for word, certain emphatic passages, messages, and so
on. That custom is essential in the ballad, it is an
accident not the essence of the epic. The epic is a poem of
complete and elaborate art, but it still bears some
birthmarks, some signs of the early popular chant, out of
which it sprung, as the garden-rose springs from the wild
stock, When this is recognised the demand for ballad-like
simplicity and 'ballad-slang' ceases to exist, and then all