We look again at Chapman’s way of rendering the caressing little passage in the fourth book of the Iliad, where Homer, wishing to speak of the ease and tenderness with which Athene turns aside the arrow shot at Menelaos, calls up the image of a mother brushing a fly from the face of her sleeping child:— “Stood close before, and slack’d the force the arrow did confer With as much care and little hurt as doth a mother use, And keep off from her babe, when sleep doth through his powers diffuse His golden humor, and th’ assaults of rude and busy flies She still checks with her careful hand.”[2] Here the Englishman has caught the notion of ease, and emphasized that; yet he has missed the tenderness, and all because he was not content to accept the simple image, but must needs refract it into “assaults of rude and busy flies.” Better is the rendering of the picturesque figure in which Ajax, beset by the Trojans, is likened to an ass belabored by a pack of boys:— “As when a dull mill ass comes near a goodly field of corn, Kept from the birds by children’s cries, the boys are overborne By his insensible approach, and simply he will eat About whom many wands are broke, and still the children beat, And still the self-providing ass doth with their weakness bear, Not stirring till his paunch be full, and scarcely then will steer.”[3] Apollo, sweeping away the rampart of the Greeks, does it as easily as a boy, who has heaped a pile of sand upon the seashore in childish sport, in sport razes it with feet and hands. Achilles half pities, half chides, the imploring, weeping Patroclos, when he says,— “Wherefore weeps my friend So like a girl, who, though she sees her mother cannot tend Her childish humors, hangs on her, and would be taken up, Still viewing her with tear-drowned eyes, when she has made her stoop.”[4] Chapman’s “hangs on her” is hardly so particular as Homer’s εἱανοῦ ἀπτομένη, plucks at her gown; and he has quite missed the picture offered by the poet, who makes the child, as soon as she discovers her mother, beg to be taken up, and insistently stop her as she goes by on some errand. Here again the naïve domestic scene in Homer is charged in Chapman with a certain half-tragic meaning. This, we think, completes the short catalogue of Homer’s indirect reference to childhood, and the comparison with the Elizabethan poet’s use of the same forms brings out more distinctly the sweet simplicity and native dignity of the Greek. When childhood is thus referred to by Homer, it is used with no condescension, and with no thought of investing it with any adventitious property. It is a part of nature, as the bees are a part of nature; and when Achilles likens his friend in his tears to a little girl wishing to be taken up by her mother, he is not taunting him with being a “cry-baby.”