(1) Astray:  A Tale of a Country Town.  By Charlotte M. Yonge, Mary Bramston, Christabel Coleridge and Esme Stuart. (Hatchards.)

(2) Betty’s Visions.  By Rhoda Broughton. (Routledge and Sons.)

(3) That Other Person.  By Mrs. Alfred Hunt. (Chatto and Windus.)

(4) A Child of the Revolution.  By the Author of Mademoiselle Mori.  (Hatchards.)

(5) Aphrodite.  Translated from the German of Ernst Eckstein by Mary J. Safford. (New York:  Williams and Gottsberger; London:  Trubner and Co.)

A POLITICIAN’S POETRY

(Pall Mall Gazette, November 3, 1886.)

Although it is against etiquette to quote Greek in Parliament, Homer has always been a great favourite with our statesmen and, indeed, may be said to be almost a factor in our political life.  For as the cross-benches form a refuge for those who have no minds to make up, so those who cannot make up their minds always take to Homeric studies.  Many of our leaders have sulked in their tents with Achilles after some violent political crisis and, enraged at the fickleness of fortune, more than one has given up to poetry what was obviously meant for party.  It would be unjust, however, to regard Lord Carnarvon’s translation of the Odyssey as being in any sense a political manifesto.  Between Calypso and the colonies there is no connection, and the search for Penelope has nothing to do with the search for a policy.  The love of literature alone has produced this version of the marvellous Greek epic, and to the love of literature alone it appeals.  As Lord Carnarvon says very truly in his preface, each generation in turn delights to tell the story of Odysseus in its own language, for the story is one that never grows old.

Of the labours of his predecessors in translation Lord Carnarvon makes ample recognition, though we acknowledge that we do not consider Pope’s Homer ‘the work of a great poet,’ and we must protest that there is more in Chapman than ‘quaint Elizabethan conceits.’  The metre he has selected is blank verse, which he regards as the best compromise between ’the inevitable redundancy of rhyme and the stricter accuracy of prose.’  This choice is, on the whole, a sensible one.  Blank verse undoubtedly gives the possibility of a clear and simple rendering of the original.  Upon the other hand, though we may get Homer’s meaning, we often miss his music.  The ten-syllabled line brings but a faint echo of the long roll of the Homeric hexameter, its rapid movement and continuous harmony.  Besides, except in the hands of a great master of song, blank verse is apt to be tedious, and Lord Carnarvon’s use of the weak ending, his habit of closing the line with an unimportant word, is hardly consistent with the stateliness of an epic, however valuable it might be in dramatic verse.  Now and then, also, Lord Carnarvon exaggerates the value of the Homeric adjective, and for one word