The faults, we said, both critical and non-critical, are certainly not lacking; and if they were not partly excused by the author’s avowedly militant position, might seem sometimes rather grave.  Whatever may have been the want of taste, and even the want of sense, in the translation of F. W. Newman, it is almost sufficient to say that they were neither greater nor less than might have been expected from a person who, if the most scholarly of eccentrics, was also the most eccentric even of English scholars.  It is difficult not to think that Mr Arnold makes too much of them and refers too frequently to them.  Such “iteration” is literally “damnable”:  it must be condemned as unfair, out of place, out of taste, and even not distantly approaching that lack of urbanity with which Mr Arnold was never tired of reproaching his countrymen.  Another translator, Mr Wright, was indeed needlessly sensitive to Mr Arnold’s strictures; but these strictures themselves were needlessly severe.  It is all very well for a reviewer, especially if he be young and anonymous, to tell a living writer that his book has “no reason for existing”; but chairs of literature are not maintained by universities that their occupants may, in relation to living persons, exercise the functions of young anonymous reviewers.  It may indeed be doubted whether these occupants should, except in the most guarded way, touch living persons at all.

Critically too, as well as from the point of view of manners, the Lectures on Translating Homer are open to not a few criticisms.  In the first place, the assumptions are enormous, and, in some cases at least, demonstrably baseless.  One of Mr Arnold’s strongest points, for instance, not merely against Mr Newman but against Homeric translators generally, is concerned with the renderings of the Homeric compound adjectives, especially the stock ones—­koruthaiolos, merops, and the rest.  The originals, he is never weary of repeating, did not strike a Greek and do not strike a Greek scholar as out of the way; the English equivalents do so strike an English reader.  Now as to the Greeks themselves, we know nothing:  they have left us no positive information on the subject.  But if (which is no doubt at least partly true) koruthaiolos and dolichoskion do not strike us, who have been familiar with Greek almost as long as we can remember, as out of the way, is that an argument?  Most of us, I suppose, at about nine or ten years old, some no doubt a little or a good deal earlier, learnt these words as part of the ordinary Greek that was presented to us, just as much as kai and ara; but if we had learnt Greek as we learn English, beginning with quite ordinary words, would it be so?  I think not; nor would it be so if people began Greek at a later and more critical stage of their education.