Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/168

 familiar and unfamiliar. Homer's words may have been familiar to the Athenians (i.e. often heard), even when they were not understood, but, at most, were guessed at; or when, being understood, they were still felt and known to be utterly foreign. Of course, when thus 'familiar', they could not 'surprise' the Athenians, as Mr Arnold complains that my renderings surprise the English. Let mine be heard as Pope or even Cowper has been heard, and no one will be 'surprised'.

Antiquated words are understood well by some, ill by others, not at all by a third class; hence it is difficult to decide the limits of a glossary. Mr Arnold speaks scornfully of me (he wonders with whom Mr Newman can have lived), that I use the words which I use, and explain those which I explain. He censures my little Glossary, for containing three words which he did not know, and some others, which, he says, are 'familiar to all the world'. It is clear, he will never want a stone to throw at me. I suppose I am often guilty of keeping low company. I have found ladies whom no one would guess to be so ill-educated, who yet do not distinctly know what lusty means; but have an uncomfortable feeling that it is very near to lustful; and understand grisly only in the sense of grizzled, grey. Great numbers mistake the sense of Buxom, Imp, Dapper, deplorably. I no more wrote