If we are not persuaded that our soul’s good depends on a knowledge of foreign languages, we can make the acquaintance of the classics of other nations in the best English renderings. Our greatest book, the King James Bible, is a translation, so great a translation that in point of style it is said by some critical scholars to be better than its Greek and Hebrew originals. In general it is true that translation falls below the original or radically changes its character. Until the nineteenth century, when the scholars of our race began to give us literal translations of the classics, which although “literal” are still idiomatic English, translators in our tongue have been, as a rule, willful conquerors who dominated the native spirit of their originals with the overwhelming power of the English language and spirit. They anglicized the foreign masterpiece so that its own father would not recognize it. The result was often, as in Pope’s “Iliad,” a new English classic but not a good pathway to the house of the foreign poet. Pope’s “Iliad” is a “classic” but it is poor Homer and not the best of Pope. His genius is much better expressed in “The Rape of the Lock.” And Homer’s genius is much better preserved for us in the simple prose of Leaf, Myers, Butcher, and Lang. Professor G. H. Palmer’s “Odyssey” is so good that no translator hereafter has a right to plead as excuse for the failure of his version of any classic that “the English language will not do it.” Matthew Arnold’s essay “On Translating Homer” will stimulate the reader’s interest in the art of translation and help bring him near to the Greek spirit. But this essay goes into subtleties which may baffle the beginner. Any beginner, old enough to read at all, can read Professor Palmer’s “Odyssey.” Many books of Greek stories and legends of the heroes have been prepared for young readers. “Old Greek Stories” by C. H. Hanson, or A. J. Church’s books of Greek life and story, together with Bulfinch’s “Age of Fable,” will initiate one into the Homeric mysteries.[5] After the reader has advanced far enough to be interested in philosophy, he will wish to read Epictetus and Plato. Jowett’s “Plato” is one of the great translations of the nineteenth century. The reader of Browning will not omit his noble, if somewhat difficult translation of the “Agamemnon” of Æschylus. From the early Elizabethans to the late Victorians the works of the English poets are starred with bits from the Latin and Greek poets. One of the finest of translations from the Greek is the “Theocritus” of Charles Stuart Calverley, the English poet, who loved all things beautiful and enjoyed all things absurd. Calverley’s translations from the classics and his delicious burlesques and parodies will give one a new sense of how close together the different moods of literature may lie in the same heart, both the heart of the poet and the heart of the reader.