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Nation 133particular degraded the canonical Greek text by resorting to colloquialShakespearean expressions, like “To grunt and sweat under a wearyload”—a judgment that again revealed the strain of bourgeoissqueamishness in Arnold’s academic elitism:if the translator of Homer […] were to employ, when he has to speakof one of Homer’s heroes under the load of calamity, this figure of“grunting” and “sweating,” we should say, He Newmanises, and hisdiction would offend us. For he is to be noble; and no plea ofwishing to be plain and natural can get him excused from being this.(ibid.:155)Arnold’s notion of Homer’s “nobility” assimilated the Greek text to thescholarly while excluding the popular. He noted that for an Americanreader the ballad “has a disadvantage in being like the rhythm of theAmerican national air Yankee Doodle, and thus provoking ludicrousassociations” (ibid.:132). And although Arnold recommended thehexameter as the most suitable verse form for Homeric translation, hewas careful to add that he didn’t have in mind the hexameters inLongfellow’s “pleasing and popular poem of Evangeline,” but ratherthose of “the accomplished Provost of Eton, Dr. Hawtrey,” who wasnot only “one of the natural judges of a translation of Homer,” but theauthor of the 1847 volume English Hexameter Translations (ibid.:149,151). Any translation was likely to be offensive to Arnold, given hisscholarly adulation of the Greek text. Newman’s mixture of homelycolloquialism, archaism, and close rendering proved positivelyalienating:The end of the nineteenth book, the answer of Achilles to his horseXanthus, Mr. Newman gives thus:—“Chestnut! why bodest death to me? from thee this was notneeded.Myself right surely know also, that ’t is my doom to perish,From mother and from father dear apart, in Troy; but neverPause will I make of war, until the Trojans be glutted.”He spake, and yelling, held afront the single-hoofedhorsesHere Mr. Newman calls Xanthus Chestnut, indeed, as he callsBalius Spotted, and Podarga Spry-foot; which is as if a Frenchmanwere to call Miss Nightingale Mdlle. Rossignol, or Mr. Bright M.