Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/599

190 a hard frost for nearly a fortnight now, and often a bitter blast of the N.E. with it; and our stable-meeting-room is not very warmable under such conditions.

"I lectured in the Chiswick Club Hall and had a scanty audience and a dull. It was a new lecture, and good, though I say it, and I really did my best; but they hung on my hands as heavy as lead. The open-air meeting at Walham Green in the morning was very creditable considering the cold weather and the underfoot misery.

"March 24th. 53 years old to-day—no use grumbling at that."

The diary is continued for a month longer, but becomes more fragmentary as it goes on, and is filled in at longer intervals. On the 27th of April it ends, with the note, "I have been busy about many things, and so unable to fill up this book."

Among these many things was his Odyssey. "I have just finished the 16th book," he writes to his daughter on the 18th of February, "and am getting the first volume through the press." This first volume was published early in April, and the second volume followed in November. It was received with the respect due to its merits. The first edition was sold out in six weeks: but it never became really popular, nor has it taken a place as the standard English version of Homer. It is perhaps one of the cases in which the disparity between the nature of the original and the method of rendering is no less vital because it lies below the surface. When Morris published the translation of the Æneid, the first criticism that occurred to many of his readers was that Homer rather than Virgil, and of the Homeric poems the Odyssey rather than the Iliad, was what he would render with the greatest sympathy and success. This may now be doubted.