The first book of Homer appears to be independent of the rest.  The plan of the Odyssey is more methodical than that of the Iliad.  The character of Achilles seems to me one of the grandest ever conceived.  There is something awful in it, particularly in the circumstance of his acting under an abiding foresight of his own death.  One day, conversing with Payne Knight and Uvedale Price concerning Homer, I expressed my admiration of Nestor’s speech, as eminently natural, where he tells the Greek leaders that they are mere children in comparison with the heroes of old whom he had known[253].  ‘But,’ said Knight and Price, ‘that passage is spurious.’  However, I will not part with it.  It is interesting to compare the same characters (Ajax, for instance) as treated by Homer, and then afterwards by the Greek dramatists, and to mark the difference of handling.  In the plays of Euripides, politics come in as a disturbing force:  Homer’s characters act on physical impulse.  There is more introversion in the dramatist:  whence Aristotle rightly calls him tsagichhotatos.  The tower-scene, where Helen comes into the presence of Priam and the old Trojans, displays one of the most beautiful pictures anywhere to be seen.  Priam’s speech[254] on that occasion is a striking proof of the courtesy and delicacy of the Homeric age, or, at least, of Homer himself.

[251] On another occasion, I believe, he intimated a desire that his works in Prose should be edited by his son-in-law, Mr. Quillinan. (Memoirs, ii. 466.)

[252] Memoirs, ii. 437-66.

[253] Iliad, i. 260.

[254] Ibid. iii. 156.

Catullus translated literally from the Greek; succeeding Roman writers did not so, because Greek had then become the fashionable, universal language.  They did not translate, but they paraphrased; the ideas remaining the same, their dress different.  Hence the attention of the poets of the Augustan age was principally confined to the happy selection of the most appropriate words and elaborate phrases; and hence arises the difficulty of translating them.

The characteristics ascribed by Horace to Pindar in his ode, ’Pindarum quisquis,’ &c. are not found in his extant writings.  Horace had many lyrical effusions of the Theban bard which we have not.  How graceful is Horace’s modesty in his ‘Ego apis Matinae More modoque,’ as contrasted with the Dircaean Swan!  Horace is my great favourite:  I love him dearly.

I admire Virgil’s high moral tone:  for instance, that sublime ’Aude, hospes, contemnere opes,’ &c. and ‘his dantem jura Catonem!’ What courage and independence of spirit is there!  There is nothing more imaginative and awful than the passage,

    ’——­Arcades ipsum
    Credunt se vidisse Jovem,’ &c.[255]

In describing the weight of sorrow and fear on Dido’s mind, Virgil shows great knowledge of human nature, especially in that exquisite touch of feeling[256],