tinctly, when he has before him my
So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of the Xanthus . . .
or my
Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you . . .
or my
So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle . . .
the exact points which I wish him to avoid in Cowper’s
So numerous seem’d those fires the banks between . . .
or in Pope’s
or in Mr. Newman’s
He spake, and yelling, held a-front his single-hoofed horses.
At the same time there may be innumerable points in mine which he ought to avoid also. Of the merit of his own compositions no composer can be admitted the judge.
But thus humbly useful to the future translator I still hope my hexameters may prove; and he it is, above all, whom one has to regard. The general public carries away little from discussions of this kind, except some vague notion that one advocates English hexameters, or that one has attacked Mr. Newman. On the mind of an adversary one never makes the faintest impression. Mr. Newman reads all one can say about diction, and his last word on the subject is, that he ‘regards it as a question about
