The Iliad of Homer - Get a Free Blog

een appropriated to the Divinity, and in
a manner consigned to mystery and religion.
For a further preservation of this air of
simplicity, a particular care should be
taken to express with all plainness those
moral sentences and proverbial speeches
which are so numerous in this poet. They
have something venerable, and as I may
say, oracular, in that unadorned gravity
and shortness with which they are delivered:
a grace which would be utterly
lost by endeavouring to give them what
we call a more ingenious (that is, a more
modern) turn in the paraphrase.
Perhaps the mixture of some Graecisms
and old words after the manner of
Milton, if done without too much affectation,
might not have an ill effect in a version
of this particular work, which most
of any other seems to require a venerable,