Here even the first inversion, ‘have Ilium’s sons thine arms Stript from Patroclus’ shoulders’, gives the reader a sense of a movement not Homeric; and the second inversion, ‘a God him contending in the van Slew’, gives this sense ten times stronger. Instead of moving on without check, as in reading the original, the reader twice finds himself, in reading the translation, brought up and checked. Homer moves with the same simplicity and rapidity in the highly-wrought as in the simple passage. It is in vain that Cowper insists on his fidelity: ‘my chief boast is that I have adhered closely to my original’:—‘the matter found in me, whether the reader like it or not, is found also in Homer; and the matter not found in me, how much soever the reader may admire it, is found only in Mr Pope’. To suppose that it is _fidelity_ to an original to give its matter, unless you at the same time give its manner; or, rather, to suppose that you can really give its matter at all, unless you can give its manner, is just the mistake of our pre-Raphaelite school of painters, who do not understand that the peculiar effect of nature resides in the whole and not in the parts. So the peculiar effect of a poet resides in his manner and movement, not in his words taken separately. It is well known how conscientiously literal is Cowper in his translation of Homer. It is well known how extravagantly free is Pope. So let it be! Portents and prodigies are lost on me; that is Pope’s rendering of the words, Ξάνθε, τί μοι θάνατον μαντεύεαι; οὐδέ τί σε χρή·[3] Xanthus, why prophesiest thou my death to me? thou needest not at all: yet, on the whole, Pope’s translation of the _Iliad_ is more Homeric than Cowper’s, for it is more rapid. Pope’s movement, however, though rapid, is not of the same kind as Homer’s; and here I come to the real objection to rhyme in a translation of Homer. It is commonly said that rhyme is to be abandoned in a translation of Homer, because ‘the exigencies of rhyme’, to quote Mr Newman, ‘positively forbid faithfulness’; because ‘a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme’, to quote Cowper, ‘is impossible’. This, however, is merely an accidental objection to rhyme. If this were all, it might be supposed, that if rhymes were more abundant Homer could be adequately translated in rhyme. But this is not so; there is a deeper, a substantial objection to rhyme in a translation of Homer. It is, that rhyme inevitably tends to pair lines which in the original are independent, and thus the movement of the poem is changed. In these lines of Chapman, for instance, from Sarpedon’s speech to Glaucus, in the twelfth book of the _Iliad_: