The Iliad; - Truth Seeker Times

X PEEFACE.
ject, no English model can be followed ; the attempt would
cripple the translator and give no pleasure to the reader. Our
real old ballad-writers are too poor and mean to represent
Homer, and are too remote in diction from our times to be
popularly intelligible. It is requisite for a translator to form
his own style. I generally adhere to the principle which
Aristotle commended in Euripides, as contrasted with ^schylus,
viz., to use little strange diction, but impart elevation by
the mode of combining known words. I am not concerned with
the historical problem, of writing in a style which actually
existed at an earlier period of our language; but with the
artistic problem of attaining a plausible aspect of moderate
antiquity, while remaining easily intelligible. Now, in doing
this, I alight on the delicate line which separates the quaint
from the grotesque. I ought to be quaint ; 1 ought not to be
grotesque. Yet no two persons vrill agree, as to where the
one ends and the other begins; and in judging concerning
a series of words, he who is for excluding one, and for retain-
ing another, finds his decision to be precisely reversed by his
neighbour. This is a diflSculty which I cannot avoid. Unless
I sacrifice a serious portion of my available vocabulary,— good
Saxon words, which only a false taste counts ignoble,—I must
retain many which one or other will avow that " he hates "
arid against hate it is useless to argue. The nature*of the case
makes me calculate, that even the man who most thoroughly
agrees with my general principles, will difi'er with me about
special words ; for certain words have different associations
and different recent histories with special miuds.
If any one wholly dislikes my translation, he has his easy
remedy,—to keep aloof from it. But if any one accepts it as
a whole, let him not think that he does a service to me or to
the world by expressing his own distaste for special words,
without suggesting better. Eor suggestions in detail, I shall be
;