By _fidelity_, some will understand the mere substitution of one language for another, with the entire sacrifice of idiom and metre, which belongs only to the literal translation of school-books. Fidelity, as Mr. C. himself has with equal happiness and precision defined it in his preface, is that quality which neither omits nor adds any thing to an author's stock. "I have invented nothing,' says he; "I have omitted nothing." When we consider the magnificent end of epic poetry,--to write for all times and all races,--to treat of what will always exist and always be understood, the puny laws of local decorum and fluctuating fashions by which the omission or modification of certain habits and customs, natural but obsolete, is prescribed, cannot come into consideration. Such laws may bind the meaner race of writers. He who translates Homer knows, that when Patroclus administers at table, or Achilles slays the sheep himself for Priam, a chief and a prince honour the chieftains and king who visit them, and disdain to leave to meaner hands these pledges of hospitality; and he translates faithfully and minutely, nor fears that any will sneer at such a custom, but those who sneer at the principle that established it. He neither "attempts to soften or refine away" the energy of passages relative to the theology of primitive ages, or fraught with allegoric images of the phenomena of nature, though they might provoke the smile of the effeminate, and of the sophists of his day. This is the first and most essential part of the fidelity prescribed to a translator; and this Mr. C. has so far scrupulously observed, that he must be allowed to have given us more of Homer, and added less of his own, than all his predecessors; and this he has done with that simplicity, that purity of manner, which we consider as the second requisite of translation.