'Oh, friends! I die, and Outis gives the blow.' "To whom with accents wing'd his friends without. 'If no[26] man harm thee, but thou art alone, And sickness feel'st, it is the stroke of Jove, And thou must bear it; yet invoke for aid Thy father Neptune, sov'reign of the floods.' "So saying, they went, and in my heart I laugh'd; That by the fiction only of a name, Slight stratagem! I had deceived them all." If translation be chiefly written for those who cannot read the original, it is, we apprehend, self-evident, that Polypheme's charging _Outis_ with an attempt on his life, and the departure of his associates in consequence of this information, must remain a problem to those who do not understand the Greek. To them, _Outis_ is the name of somebody, and why that should pacify the giants who came to assist the Cyclops, appears unsatisfactory, if not inconceivable. Clarke, when he adduces the passage from the Acta Eruditorum, which censures Gyphanius for having translated _Outis_, _nemo_, would have done well if he had adduced other reasons in support of his opinion (if indeed he coincided in opinion with that passage) than grammatical futilities. The separation of ου-δε can be no reason why the brethren of Polypheme should depart; his destruction remained a call equally urgent for their assistance, whether it was carrying on by fraud or force. In Homer, whenever a man is asked after his name, he replies, they call me so, or my mother has given me such a name; and this is always in the accusative. Ulysses, to deceive Polypheme, consults probability, and the customary reply to a question after a name, and therefore calls him _Outin_, not _Outina_, to escape the suspicion of the Cyclops; but well surmised, or Homer at least for him, that his enemy would pronounce his name in the nominative, if he should be asked who was his destroyer. If the deception be puerile, it is to be considered, that no sense can be obtained without it; and on whom is it practised? on something worse than a solitary barbarian not trained up in social craft; it is exerted on a monster of mixed nature, unacquainted with other ideas than the immediate ones of self-preservation, brutal force, and greedy appetite. The whole fiction is indeed one of those which Longinus calls dreams, but the dreams of Jupiter; and the improbabilities of the component parts vanish in the pathos, and the restless anguish of curiosity which overwhelms us in the conduct of the tale.[27]