students of the original.

The passages which will be least noticed, and possibly not at all,
except by those who shall wish to find me at a fault, are those which
have cost me abundantly the most labor. It is difficult to kill a
sheep with dignity in a modern language, to flay and to prepare it for
the table, detailing every circumstance of the process. Difficult
also, without sinking below the level of poetry, to harness mules to a
wagon, particularizing every article of their furniture, straps,
rings, staples, and even the tying of the knots that kept all
together. HOMER, who writes always to the eye, with all his sublimity
and grandeur, has the minuteness of a Flemish painter.

But in what degree I have succeeded in my version either of these
passages, and such as these, or of others more buoyant and
above-ground, and especially of the most sublime, is now submitted to
the decision of the reader, to whom I am ready enough to confess that
I have not at all consulted their approbation, who account nothing
grand that is not turgid, or elegant that is not bedizened with
metaphor.

I purposely decline all declamation on the merits of HOMER, because a
translator's praises of his author are liable to a suspicion of
dotage, and because it were impossible to improve on those which this
author has received already. He has been the wonder of all countries
that his works have ever reached, even deified by the greatest names
of antiquity, and in some places actually worshipped. And to say
truth, were it possible that mere man could entitle himself by
pre-eminence of any kind to divine honors, Homer's astonishing powers
seem to have given him the best pretensions.

I cannot conclude without due acknowledgments to the best critic in
HOMER I have ever met with, the learned and ingenious Mr. FUSELI.
Unknown as he was to me when I entered on this arduous undertaking
(indeed to this moment I have never seen him) he yet voluntarily and
generously offered himself as my revisor. To his classical taste and
just discernment I have been indebted for the discovery of many
blemishes in my own work, and of beauties, which would otherwise have
escaped me, in the original. But his necessary avocations would not
suffer him to accompany me farther than to the latter books of the
Iliad, a circumstance which I fear my readers, as well as myself, will
regret with too much reason.[1]

I have obligations likewise to many friends, whose names, we