d that
therefore, in a certain sense, he is constantly over-rated. He
pays the penalty of his over-whelming reputation: his fame is
chiefly in the mouths of those who know him not at all, and
use their hats for speaking-trumpets. We have in English no
approximately decent translation of him. Someone said that Pope
served him as Puck served Bully Bottom, what time Peter Quince
was moved to cry: "Bless thee Bottom, how thou art translated!"
It is not so; to call Pope an ass would be to wrong a faithful
and patient quadruped; than which Pope was as much greater in
intellect as he was less in all qualities that call for true
respect. Yet often we applaud Homer, only upon a knowledge of
Pope; and it is safe to say that if you love Pope you would
loathe Homer. Pope held that water should manifest, so to say,
through Kew or Versailles fountains; but it was essentially to
be from the Kitchen-tap--or even from the sewer. Homer was more
familiar with it thundering on the precipices, or lisping on the
yellow sands of time-forgotten Mediterranean islands. Which
pronunciation do you prefer for his often-recurring and famous
sea-epithet: the thunder-on-the-precipices of

_poluphloisboio thalasses,_

or the lisping-on-the-sands of

_ poluphleesbeeo thalassace?_

(pardon the attempted phonetics).--For truly there are advocates
of either; but neither I suppose would have appealed much to
Mr. Pope.

As to his style, his manner or movement: to summarize what
Mathew Arnold says of it (the best I can do): it is as direct
and rapid as Scott's; as lucid as Wordsworth's could be; but
noble like Shakespeare's or Milton's. There is no Dantesque
periphrasis, nor Miltonian agnostic struggle and inversion; but
he calls spades, spades, and moves on to the next thing swiftly,
clearly, and yet with exultation. (Yet there is retardation
often by long similes.) And he either made a language for
himself, or found one ready to his hand, as resonant and sonorous
as the loll and slap of billows in the hollow caverns of the sea.
As his lines swing in and roll and crash, they swell the soul in
you, and you hear and grow great on the rhythm of the eternal.
This though we really, I suppose, are quite uncertain as to the
pronunciation. But give the vowels merely a plain English value,
certain to be wrong, and you still have grand music. Perhaps
some of you have read Mathew Arnold's great essay _On Translating
Homer,_ and know