Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/24

Rh knows the literal value of the Greek so well, that he thinks his literal rendering identical with the Greek, and that the Greek must stand or fall along with his rendering. But the real question is, not whether he has given us, so to speak, full change for the Greek, but how he gives us our change: we want it in gold, and he gives it us in copper. Again: ‘It is quaint,’ says Mr. Newman, ‘to address a young friend as “O Pippin!”—it is quaint to compare Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring.’ Here, too, Mr. Newman goes much too fast, and his category of quaintness is too comprehensive. To address a young friend as ‘O Pippin!’ is, I cordially agree with him, very quaint; although I do not think it was quaint in Sarpedon to address Glaucus as : but in comparing, whether in Greek or in English, Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring, I do not see that there is of necessity anything quaint at all. Again; because I said that eld, lief, in sooth, and other words, are, as Mr. Newman uses them in certain places, bad words, he imagines that I must mean to stamp these words with an absolute reprobation; and because I said that ‘my Bibliolatry is excessive,’ he imagines that I brand all words as ignoble which are not in the Bible. Nothing of the kind: there are no such absolute rules to be laid down in these matters. The Bible vocabulary is to be used as an assistance, not as an authority. Of the words which, placed wharewhere [sic] Mr. Newman places