t Pope nobly revindicates his unparalleled power of translating
funnily, when, in place of "the walls drip with blood," he writes--

"With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round."

Homer does not appear to have been acquainted with rubies; but what of
that? And how noble, how eminently worthy of Pope it is to add that the
ghosts "howl"! I tried to make them gibber, but ghosts _do_ gibber in
Homer (though not in this passage), so Pope, Fenton, Broome, and Co.,
make them howl.

No, Pope is not lightly to be rivalled by a modern translator. The
following example, a far-off following of a noted contemporary poet, may
be left unsigned--

"Wretches, the bane hath befallen, the night and the blight of your
sin
Sweeps like a shroud o'er the faces and limbs that were gladsome
therein;
And the dirge of the dead breaketh forth, and the faces of all men are
wet,
And the walls are besprinkled with blood, and the ghosts in the
gateway are met,
Ghosts in the court and the gateway are gathered, Hell opens her lips,
And the sun in his splendour is shrouded, and sickens in spasm of
eclipse."

The next is longer and slower: the poet has a difficulty in telling his
story:

"Wretches," he cried, "what doom is this? what night
Clings like a face-cloth to the face of each,--
Sweeps like a shroud o'er knees and head? for lo!
The windy wail of death is up, and tears
On every cheek are wet; each shining wall
And beauteous interspace of beam and beam
Weeps tears of blood, and shadows in the door
Flicker, and fill the portals and the court--
Shadows of men that hellwards yearn--and now
The sun himself hath perished out of heaven,
And all the land is darkened with a mist."

That could never be mistaken for a version by the Laureate, as perhaps
any contemporary hack's works might have been taken for Pope's. The
difficulty, perhaps, lies here: any one knows where to have Pope, any one
knows that he will evade the _mot propre_, though the precise evasion he
may select is hard to guess. But the Laureate would keep close to his
text, and yet would write like himself, very beautifully, but not with an
Homeric swiftness and strength. Who is to imitate him? As to Mr.
William Morris, he might be fabled to render [Greek text] "niddering
wights," but beyond that, conjecture is baffled. {91} Or is _this_ the
kind of thing?--

"Niddering wights, what a bane do ye