Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/134

 who can read the original will never care to read through any translation; and the unlearned look on all, even the best hexameters, whether from Southey, Lockhart or Longfellow, as odd and disagreeable prose. Mr Arnold deprecates appeal to popular taste: well he may! yet if the unlearned are to be our audience, we cannot defy them. I myself, before venturing to print, sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children would accept my verses. I could boast how children and half-educated women have extolled them; how greedily a working man has inquired for them, without knowing who was the translator; but I well know that this is quite insufficient to establish the merits of a translation. It is nevertheless one point. 'Homer is popular', is one of the very few matters of fact in this controversy on which Mr Arnold and I are agreed. 'English hexameters are not popular', is a truth so obvious, that I do not yet believe he will deny it. Therefore, 'Hexameters are not the metre for translating Homer'. Q. E. D.

I cannot but think that the very respectable scholars who pertinaciously adhere to the notion that English hexameters have something 'epical' in them, have no vivid feeling of the difference between Accent and Quantity: and this is the less wonderful, since so very few persons have ever actually heard quantitative verse. I have; by