those who are ostensibly scholars, thus assail my version, and the great majority of magazines and reviews ignore it, its existence can never become known to the public; or it will exist not to be read, but to be despised without being opened; and it must perish as many meritorious books perish. I but lately picked up, new, and for a fraction of its price, at a second-hand stall, a translation of the Iliad by T. S. Brandreth, Esq. (Pickering, London), into Cowper's metre, which is, as I judge, immensely superior to Cowper. Its date is 1846: I had never heard of it. It seems to have perished uncriticized, unreproved, unwept, unknown. I do not wish my progeny to die of neglect, though I am willing that it should be slain in battle. However, just because I address myself to the public unlearned in Greek, and because Mr Arnold lays before them a new, paradoxical, monstrously erroneous representation of facts, with the avowed object of staying the plague of my Homer; I am forced to reply to him.
Knowingly or unknowingly, he leads his readers to confuse four different questions: 1. whether Homer is thoroughly intelligible to modern scholars; 2. whether Homer was antiquated to the Athenians of Themistocles and Pericles; 3. whether he was thoroughly understood by them; 4: whether he is, absolutely, an antique poet.
