part of our young Napoleon to the
shedding of blood,--that is, of other men's; since he was eager to
involve the country in another war by the refusal to surrender Mason and
Slidell. Natural timidity and irresolution no doubt had their influence.
But beyond this was the slowly awakened consciousness that Slavery was
the real assailant of our national existence. General McClellan saw,
that, in order to carry out the policy to which he had been long
committed, in order to save both slavery and the Union, there must be
little fighting and a speedy compromise. It is only on this hypothesis
that his course while in high command, but especially during that long
autumn and winter, admits of a consistent and intelligible explanation.

_The Iliad of Homer faithfully translated into Unrhymed
English Metre._ By F. W. NEWMAN. London. 1856.

Mr. Newman executed this translation upon the theory that Homer was a
"noble savage"; that his congener would be found in a "lively African
from the Gold-Coast"; that his style of language and thought was to the
age of Pericles what that of the very oldest ballads is to ours; that he
must be rendered, therefore, in English by a ballad-metre and an
antiquated diction. To this capricious and indefensible theory, and to
the translation, so far as founded upon it, Mr. Matthew Arnold seems to
have given the _coup de grace_. We come, accordingly, not to criticize,
but to bury.

_Hic jacet_, therefore, what was mortal of Newman's Homer,--a work
executed upon a theory which no art of performance could redeem, while
to that theory it was rather clumsily than skilfully adapted. Yet was it
the work of a scholar so thorough, of a writer so able, of a translator
so faithful to his original, that no error of theory could wholly
vitiate his performance. The pictures of Homer, despite the crudity of
his coloring and the spots and daubs with which his rendering was
conscientiously sprinkled, he brought out more clearly than any had done
before him. His work, therefore, being dead, still lives; its ashes glow
and shine from the urn which contains them. Its ill-fortune was, that
it was only antiquarian literature from its birth; its good-fortune is,
that it shall never cease to be cherished as such. _Honestas mortem
vincit_: the high degrees of intellectual sincerity and power conquer
even literary damnation.

1. _On Translating Homer._ By MATTHEW ARNOLD. London.

2. _Last Words._ By t