Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/144

 for the driest prose of a naval catalogue , in short, for all early thought. Mr Arnold appears to forget, though he cannot be ignorant, that prose-composition is later than Homer, and that in the epical days every initial effort at prose history was carried on in Homeric doggerel by the Cyclic poets, who traced the history of Troy ab ovo in consecutive chronology. I say, he is merely inadvertent, he cannot be ignorant, that the Homeric metre, like my metre, subserves prosaic thought with the utmost facility; but I hold it to be, not indavertence, but blindness, when he does not see that Homer's τὸν δ' ἀπαμειβόμενος is a line of as thoroughly unaffected oratio pedestris as any verse of Pythagoras or Horace's Satires.. 'To such a mill all would be grist that came near it, and in no grain that had once passed through it would human ingenuity ever detect again a characteristic quality'. This writer is a stout maintainer that English ballad metre is the right one for translating Homer: only, somehow, he shuts his eyes to the fact that Campbell's is ballad metre! Sad to say, extravagant and absurd assertions, like these, though anonymous, can, by a parade of learning, do much damage to the sale of a book in verse.]