pattern piece seven lines long, and with an express and gratuitous remark, that in using 'to a' for a Spondee, he has perhaps relied too much on accent. I hold up these phenomena in Mr Arnold as a warning to all scholars, of the pit of delusion into which they will fall, if they allow themselves to talk fine about the 'Homeric rhythm' as now heard, and the duty of a translator to reproduce something of it.
It is not merely the sound and the metre of Homer, which are impaired by the loss of his radical w; in extreme cases the sense also is confused. Thus if a scholar be asked, what is the meaning of ἐείσατο in the Iliad? he will have to reply: If it stands for eweisato, it means, 'he was like', and is related to the English root wis and wit, Germ. wiss, Lat. vid; but it may also mean 'he went'—a very eccentric Homerism,—in which case we should perhaps write it eyeisato, as in old English we have he yode or yede instead of he goed, gaed, since too the current root in Greek and Latin i (go) may be accepted as ye, answering to German geh, English go. Thus two words, eweisato, 'he was like', eyeisato, 'he went', are confounded in our text. I will add, that in the Homeric
—ἤϋτε wέθνεα (γ)εῖσι—(Il. 2, 87)
—διὰ πρὸ δὲ (γ)είσατο καὶ τῆς (Il. 4, 138)
my ear misses the consonant, though Mr
