Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/137

 *and-out Æolian was Homer,—his laws of accent must have been almost Latin. According to this, Erasmus, following the track of Virgil blindly, has taught us to pronounce Euripides and Plato ridiculously ill, but Homer, with an accuracy of accent which puts Aristarchus to shame. This is no place for discussing so difficult a question. Suffice it to say, first, that Mr Arnold cannot take refuge in such a theory, since he does not admit that Homer was antiquated to Euripides; next, that admitting the theory to him, still the loss of the Digamma destroys to him the true rhythm of Homer. I shall recur to both questions below. I here add, that our English pronunciation even of Virgil often so ruins Virgil's own quantities, that there is something either of delusion or of pedantry in our scholars' self-complacency in the rhythm which they elicit.

I think it fortunate for Mr Arnold, that he had not 'courage to translate Homer'; for he must have failed to make it acceptable to the unlearned. But if the public ear prefers ballad metres, still (Mr Arnold assumes) 'the scholar' is with him in this whole controversy. Nevertheless it gradually comes out that neither is this the case, but he himself is in the minority. P. 110, he writes: 'When one observes the boistering, rollicking way in which Homer's English admirers—even men of genius, like the late Professor Wilson—love to talk of