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And scarcely had she begun to wash

Ere she was aware of the grisly gash

Above his knee that lay.

It was a wound from a wild boar’s tooth,

All on Parnassus’ slope,

Where he went to hunt in the days of his youth

With his mother’s sire,

and so on. That is the true ballad-manner, no one can deny; ‘all on Parnassus’ slope’ is, I was going to say, the true ballad-slang; but never again shall I be able to read

νίζε δ’ ἄῤ ἆσσον ἴουσα ἄναχθ’ ἑόν· αὐτίκα δ’ ἔγνω

οὐλήν,

without having the destestable dance of Dr Maginn’s

And scarcely had she begun to wash

Ere she was aware of the grisly gash,

jigging in my ears, to spoil the effect of Homer, and to torture me. To apply that manner and that rhythm to Homer’s incidents, is not to imitate Homer, but to travesty him.

Lastly I come to Mr Newman. His rhythm, like Chapman’s and Dr Maginn’s, is a ballad-rhythm, but with a modification of his own. ‘Holding it’, he tells us, ‘as an axiom, that rhyme must be abandoned’, he found, on abandoning it, ‘an unpleasant void until he gave a double ending to the verse’. In short, instead of saying