I am persuaded that the demand for prose translations of poets had arisen, in this country, more from a sort of desperate reaction against certain vicious principles of the old English school of translation, than from a serious consideration either of the nature of the thing, or of the capacity of our noble language. In Germany, I do not find that this notion has ever been entertained; plainly because the German poetical translations did not err, like our English ones, in conspiring, by every sort of fine flourishing and delicate furbishment, to obscure or to blot out what was most characteristic in their originals. The proper problem of an English translator is not _how to say a thing as the author would have said it, had he been an Englishman_; but _how, through the medium of the English language, to make the English reader feel both what he said and how he said it, being a Greek_. Now, any one who is familiar with the general run of English rhythmical translations, of which Pope's Iliad is the pattern, must be aware that they have too often been executed under the influence of the former of these principles rather than the latter. In Pope's Homer, and in Sotheby's also, I must add, we find many, perhaps all the finest passages very finely done; but so as Pope or Sotheby might have done themselves in an original poem written at the present day, while that which is most peculiarly Homeric, a certain blunt naturalness and a talkative simplicity, we do not find in these translators at all. The very things which most strike the eye of the accomplished connoisseur, and feed the meditations of the student of human nature, are omitted.