Of the labours of his predecessors in translation Lord Carnarvon makes ample recognition, though we acknowledge that we do not consider Pope's Homer 'the work of a great poet,' and we must protest that there is more in Chapman than 'quaint Elizabethan conceits.' The metre he has selected is blank verse, which he regards as the best compromise between 'the inevitable redundancy of rhyme and the stricter accuracy of prose.' This choice is, on the whole, a sensible one. Blank verse undoubtedly gives the possibility of a clear and simple rendering of the original. Upon the other hand, though we may get Homer's meaning, we often miss his music. The ten-syllabled line brings but a faint echo of the long roll of the Homeric hexameter, its rapid movement and continuous harmony. Besides, except in the hands of a great master of song, blank verse is apt to be tedious, and Lord Carnarvon's use of the weak ending, his habit of closing the line with an unimportant word, is hardly consistent with the stateliness of an epic, however valuable it might be in dramatic verse. Now and then, also, Lord Carnarvon exaggerates the value of the Homeric adjective, and for one word in the Greek gives us a whole line in the English. The simple [Greek text], for instance, is converted into 'And when the shades of evening fall around,' in the second book, and elsewhere purely decorative epithets are expanded into elaborate descriptions. However, there are many pleasing qualities in Lord Carnarvon's verse, and though it may not contain much subtlety of melody, still it has often a charm and sweetness of its own. The description of Calypso's garden, for example, is excellent: Around the grotto grew a goodly grove, Alder, and poplar, and the cypress sweet; And the deep-winged sea-birds found their haunt, And owls and hawks, and long-tongued cormorants, Who joy to live upon the briny flood. And o'er the face of the deep cave a vine Wove its wild tangles and clustering grapes. Four fountains too, each from the other turned, Poured their white waters, whilst the grassy meads Bloomed with the parsley and the violet's flower. The story of the Cyclops is not very well told. The grotesque humour of the Giant's promise hardly appears in Thee then, Noman, last of all Will I devour, and this thy gift shall be, and the bitter play on words Odysseus makes, the pun on [Greek text], in fact, is not noticed. The idyll of Nausicaa, however, is very gracefully translated, and there is a great deal that is delightful in the Circe episode. For simplicity of diction this is also very good: