prove that neither Mr. Arnold nor any other scholar can form any adequate conception of the impression which the poems of Homer produced either on the ear or the mind of a Greek; but in doing this he proves too much for his own case, where it turns upon the class of words proper to be used in translating him.  Mr. Newman says he sometimes used low words; and since his theory of the duty of a translator is, that he should reproduce the moral effect of his author,—­be noble where he is noble, barbarous, if he be barbarous, and quaint, if quaint,—­so he should render low words by words as low.  But here his own dilemma meets him:  how does he know that Homer’s words did seem low to a Greek?  We agree with him in refusing to be conventional; so would Mr. Arnold; only one would call conventional what the other would call elegant, the question again resolving itself into one of personal taste.  We agree with him also in his preference for words that have it certain strangeness and antique dignity about them, but think he should stop short of anything that needs a glossary.  He might learn from Chapman’s version, however, that it is not the widest choice of archaic words, but intensity of conception and phrase, that gives a poem life, and keeps it living, in spite of grave defects.  Where Chapman, in a famous passage, ("Odyssey,” v. 612,) tells us, that, when Ulysses crawled ashore after his shipwreck, “the sea had soaked his heart through,” it is not the mere simplicity of the language, but the vivid conception which went before and compelled the simplicity, that is impressive.  We believe Mr. Newman is right in refusing to sacrifice a good word because it may be pronounced mean by individual caprice, wrong in attempting the fatal impossibility of rescuing a word which to all minds alike conveys a low or ludicrous meaning, as, for example, pate, and dopper, for which he does battle doughtily.  Mr. Newman is guilty of a fallacy when he brings up brick, sell, and cut as instances in support of his position, for in these cases Mr. Arnold would only object to his use of them in their slang sense.  He himself would hardly venture to say that Hector was a brick, that Achilles cut Agamemnon, or that Ulysses sold Polyphemus.  It is precisely because Hobbes used language in this way that his translation of Homer is so ludicrous.  Wordsworth broke down in his theory, that the language of poetry should be the every-day speech of men and women, though he nearly succeeded in finally extirpating “poetic diction.”  We think the proper antithesis is not between prosaic and poetic words, nor between the speech of actual life and a conventionalized diction, but between the language of real life (which is something different from the actual, or matter-of-fact) and that of artificial life, or society,—­that is, between phrases fit to express the highest passion, feeling, aspiration, and those adapted to the intercourse of polite life,