The literalists will never like him, of course; he drops words that worry him--whole lines indeed with which he does not choose to grapple; he adds words, too--whole lines, scenes almost; there is vulgarity sometimes, and coarseness; he calls things by their old homely names; there is no fine talk about the chest or the abdomen, but the Greek lances drive straight through the ribs or to the navel, and if a cut be clean and large--we are not told of crimson tides--but the blood gurgles out in great gouts as in a slaughter-house; there may be over-plainness, and over-heat, and over-stress; but nowhere weakness; and his unwieldly, staggering lines--fourteen syllables long--forge on through the ruts which the Homeric chariots have worn, bouncing and heaving and plunging and jolting, but always lunging forward with their great burden of battle, of brazen shields, and ponderous war-gods. I hardly know where to cut into the welter of his long lines for sample, but in all parts his brawny pen declares itself. Take a bit from that skrimmage of the Sixteenth Book where-- “The swift Meriones Pursuing flying Acamas, just as he got access To horse and chariot--overtook, and dealt him such a blow On his right shoulder that he left his chariot, and did strow The dusty earth: life left limbs, and night his eyes possessed. Idomeneus his stern dart at Erymas addressed, As--like to Acamas--he fled; it cut the sundry bones Beneath his brain, betwixt his neck and foreparts, and so runs, Shaking his teeth out, through his mouth, his eyes all drowned in blood; So through his nostrils and his mouth, that now dart-open stood, He breathed his spirit.” And again that wonderful duel between Patroclus and the divine Sarpedon: “Down jumped he from his chariot, down leaped his foe as light, And as, on some far-looking rock, a cast of vultures fight, --Fly on each other, strike and truss--part, meet, and then stick by, Tug, both with crooked beaks and seres, cry, fight, and fight and cry; So fiercely fought these angry kings, and showed as bitter galls.” What a description this old Chapman would have made of a tug at foot-ball! Another fragment I take from the Twenty-first Book, where the River God roars and rages in the waters of Scamander against Achilles: ----“Then swell’d his waves, then rag’d, then boil’d again Against Achilles, up flew all, and all the bodies slain In all his deeps, of which the heaps made bridges to his waves He belch’d out, roaring like a bull. The unslain yet he saves In his black whirl-pits, vast and deep. A horrid billow stood About Achilles. On his shield the violence of the Flood Beat so, it drove him back, and took his feet up, his fair palm Enforc’d to catch into his stay a broad and lofty elm, Whose roots he tossed up with his hold, and tore up all the shore.”