Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/77

66, when he has before him my

or my

or my

the exact points which I wish him to avoid in Cowper’s

or in Pope’s

or in Mr. Newman’s

At the same time there may be innumerable points in mine which he ought to avoid also. Of the merit of his own compositions no composer can be admitted the judge.

But thus humbly useful to the future translator I still hope my hexameters may prove; and he it is, above all, whom one has to regard. The general public carries away little from discussions of this kind, except some vague notion that one advocates English hexameters, or that one has attacked Mr. Newman. On the mind of an adversary one never makes the faintest impression. Mr. Newman reads all one can say about diction, and his last word on the subject is, that he ‘regards it as a question about