The Iliad of Homer | Page 6

work as promising some usefulness to young students of the original.
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 labor. 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 wagon, 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.
But in what degree I have succeeded in my version either of these passages, and such as these, or of others more buoyant and?above-ground, and especially of the most sublime, is now submitted to the decision of the reader, to whom I am ready enough to confess that I have not at all consulted their approbation, who account nothing grand that is not turgid, or elegant that is not bedizened with metaphor.
I purposely decline all declamation on the merits of HOMER, because a translator's praises of his author are liable to a suspicion of dotage, and because it were impossible to improve on those which this author has received already. He has been the wonder of all countries that his works have ever reached, even deified by the greatest names of antiquity, and in some places actually worshipped. And to say truth, were it possible that mere man could entitle himself by pre-eminence of any kind to divine honors, Homer's astonishing powers seem to have given him the best pretensions.
I cannot conclude without due acknowledgments to the best critic in HOMER I have ever met with, the learned and ingenious Mr. FUSELI. Unknown as he was to me when I entered on this arduous undertaking (indeed to this moment I have never seen him) he yet voluntarily and generously offered himself as my revisor. To his classical taste and just discernment I have been indebted for the discovery of many blemishes in my own work, and of beauties, which would otherwise have escaped me, in the original. But his necessary avocations would not suffer him to accompany me farther than to the latter books of the Iliad, a circumstance which I fear my readers, as well as myself, will regret with too much reason.[1]
I have obligations likewise to many friends, whose names, were it proper to mention them here, would do me great honor. They have encouraged me by their approbation, have assisted me with valuable books, and have eased me of almost the whole labor of transcribing.
And now I have only to regret that my pleasant work is ended. To the illustrious Greek I owe the smooth and easy flight of many thousand hours. He has been my companion at home and abroad, in the study, in the garden, and in the field; and no measure of success, let my labors succeed as they may, will ever compensate to me the loss of the innocent luxury that I have enjoyed, as a translator of HOMER.
Footnote:?1. Some of the few notes subjoined to my translation of the Odyssey
are by Mr. FUSELI, who had a short opportunity to peruse the MSS. while the Iliad was printing. They are marked with his initial.
PREFACE
PREPARED BY MR. COWPER,
FOR A
SECOND EDITION.

Soon after my publication of this work, I began to prepare it for a second edition, by an accurate revisal of the first. It seemed to me, that here and there, perhaps a slight alteration might satisfy the demands of some, whom I was desirous to please; and I comforted myself with the reflection, that if I still failed to conciliate all, I should yet have no cause to account myself in a singular degree unfortunate. To please an unqualified judge, an author must sacrifice too much; and the attempt to please an uncandid one were altogether hopeless. In one