This version is still unblotted by printer’s ink:  if any compositor pleases he is welcome to work on the copy; which I can supply gratis:  only I do not promise to do more than I have done, Book Alpha.  Life is too short for such literary playwork.

Here followeth a sample:  quite literal:  line for line, almost word for word:  my translation renders Homer exactly.  I choose the short bit where Thetis pleads with Jove for her irate son, because I am sure Tennyson must have had this passage in his mind when he drew his word-picture of Vivien with Merlin.

    “But now at length the twelfth morn from the first had arrived;
        and returning
    Came to Olympus together the glorious band of immortals,
    Zeus the great king at their head.  And Thetis, remembering the
        cravings
    Of her own son, and his claims, uprose to the surface of ocean,
    And through the air flew swift to high heaven, ascending Olympus. 
    There she found sitting alone on the loftiest peak of the mountain
    All-seeing Zeus, son of Kronos, apart from the other celestials. 
    So she sat closely beside him, embracing his knees with her
        left hand,
    While with her right she handled his beard, and tenderly stroked it,
    Whispering thus her prayer to Zeus, the great king, son of
        Kronos,” &c. &c.

Let that suffice with a caetera desunt.

I need not say that I have written innumerable other, translated pieces, from earliest days of school exercises to these present.  There is scarcely a classic I have not so tampered with:  and (though a poor modern linguist) I have touched—­with dictionary and other help, a few bits of Petrarch, Dante, &c.; examples whereof may be seen in my “Modern Pyramid,” as already mentioned.

Sundry Pamphlets.

My several publications in pamphlet shape may ask for a page or two,—­the chief perhaps (and therefore I begin with it) being my “Hymn for All Nations” in thirty languages, issued at the time of the first great exhibition in 1851, due to a letter I wrote to the Bishop of London on November 22, 1850, urging such a universal psalm.  Mr. Brettell, a printer, issued this curiosity of typography:  for it has all the strange types which the Bible Society could lend; and several other, versions than the fifty published (some being duplicated) are in a great volume before me, unprinted because neither England, nor Germany, nor America could supply types for sundry out-of-the-way languages contributed by missionaries in the four quarters of the world.  My hymn was “a simple psalm, so constructed as scarcely to exclude a truth, or to offend a prejudice; with special reference to the great event of this year, and yet so ordered that it can never be out of season.”  “This polyglot hymn at the lowest estimate is a philological curiosity:  so many minds, with such diversity in similitude rendering literally into all the languages