The Iliad of Homer | Page 7

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 or other of these classes may be ranged all
such objectors, as would deprive blank verse of one of its principal advantages, the
variety of its pauses; together with all such as deny the good effect, on the whole, of a
line, now and then, less harmonious than its fellows.
With respect to the pauses, it has been affirmed with an unaccountable rashness, that
HOMER himself has given me an example of verse without them. Had this been true, it
would by no means have concluded against the use of them in an English version of
HOMER; because, in one language, and in one species of metre, that may be musical,
which in another would be found disgusting. But the assertion is totally unfounded. The
pauses in Homer's verse are so frequent and various, that to name another poet, if pauses
are a fault, more faulty than he, were, perhaps, impossible. It may even be questioned, if a
single passage of ten lines flowing with uninterrupted smoothness could be singled out
from all the thousands that he has left us. He frequently pauses at the first word of the
line, when it consists of three or more syllables; not seldom when of two; and sometimes
even when of one only. In this practice he was followed, as was observed in my Preface
to the first edition, by the Author of the Paradise Lost. An example inimitable indeed, but

which no writer of English heroic verse without rhyme can neglect with impunity.
Similar to this is the objection which proscribes absolutely the occasional use of a line
irregularly constructed. When Horace censured Lucilius for his lines incomposite pede
currentes, he did not mean to say, that he was chargeable with such in some instances, or
even in many, for then the censure would have been equally applicable to himself; but he
designed by that expression to characterize all his writings. The censure therefore was
just; Lucilius wrote at a time when the Roman verse had not yet received its polish, and
instead of introducing artfully his rugged lines, and to serve a particular purpose, had
probably seldom, and never but by accident, composed a smooth one. Such has been the
versification of the earliest poets in every country. Children lisp, at first, and stammer;
but, in time, their speech becomes fluent, and, if they are well taught, harmonious.
HOMER himself is not invariably regular in the construction of his verse. Had he been so,
Eustathius, an excellent critic and warm admirer of HOMER, had never affirmed, that
some of his lines want a head, some a tail, and others a middle. Some begin with a word
that is neither dactyl nor spondee, some conclude with a dactyl, and in the intermediate
part he sometimes deviates equally from the established custom. I confess that instances
of this sort are rare; but they are surely, though few, sufficient to warrant a sparing use of
similar license in the present day.
Unwilling, however, to seem obstinate in both these particulars, I conformed myself in
some measure to these objections, though unconvinced myself of their propriety. Several
of the rudest and most unshapely lines I composed anew; and several of the pauses least
in use I displaced for the sake of an easier enunciation.--And this was the state of the
work after the revisal given it about seven years since.
Between that revisal and the present a considerable time intervened, and the effect of
long discontinuance was, that I became more dissatisfied with it myself, than the most
difficult to be pleased of all my judges. Not for the sake of a few uneven lines or
unwonted pauses, but for reasons far more substantial. The diction seemed to me in many
passages either not sufficiently elevated, or deficient in the grace of ease, and in others I
found the sense of the original either not adequately expressed or misapprehended. Many
elisions still remained unsoftened; the compound epithets I found not always happily
combined, and