But if the translator often deviate from his model in so essential a requisite, he scrupulously adheres to another of much less consequence,--the observance of those customary epithets with which Homer distinguishes his gods and heroes from each other. As most of these are frequently no more than harmonious expletives of the verse, often serve only as a ceremonious introduction to his speakers, we are of opinion, that he might at least have sometimes varied them with advantage to his verse, and for the greater gratification of his reader. He who thought it a venial licence to deviate in the first line of his work from the text, who cries--'woe to the land of dwarfs,'[17]--who makes his hero often 'the swiftest of the swift,' tinges the locks of Menelaus with 'amber,' and varies Eumæus from plain swineherd to 'the illustrious steward or noble pastor of the sties,' he surely might have saved us from the 'archer-god,' 'the cloud-assembler Jove,' the 'city-spoiler chief,' the 'cloud-assembler deity,' &c. &c. &c. or, in mercy to our debauched ears, have meditated combinations more consonant to verse and language. Their casual omission would not have proved a greater infidelity than that which made him disregard names and epithets, expressly repeated in the original, of which that of Asius the Hyrtacide in the catalogue[18] is a striking instance. Homer is ample, and the translator studies to be so, and generally with success; but Homer is likewise concise, where Mr. C. is often verbose, and where, by more careful meditation, or more frequent turning of line and period, he might have approached his master. Homer finishes; but, like Nature, without losing the whole in the parts. The observations which the translator offers on this in the Preface we are tempted to transcribe. Pref. p. xv. "The passages which will be least noticed, and possibly not at all, except by those who shall wish to find me at a fault, are those which have cost me abundantly the most labour. It is difficult to kill a sheep with dignity in a modern language, to flay and to prepare it for the table, detailing every circumstance of the process. Difficult also, without sinking below the level of poetry, to harness mules to a waggon, particularizing every article of their furniture, straps, rings, staples, and even the tying of the knots that kept all together. Homer, who writes always to the eye, with all his sublimity and grandeur, has the minuteness of a Flemish painter."