terest was no more-and by begging on the road, and reciting his verses, he kept but body and soul together, while he proceeded from thence to Cuma. The circumstances of his being blind, and of his asking alms as he journeyed, procured him the name of Homer (or blind itinerant), which has already stood the test of nearly three thousand years, and bids fair to live over the same period again, if not to be immortal. Having reached Cuma, in this miserable condition, without scrip or sight, he made an offer to immortalize the city, if provided with a maintenance; but this proposition was rejected: and the bard, angered by their inhospitality, and the refusal of his services, quitted them with a wish that "there never might arise a poet to celebrate them."

The bard travelled from Cuma to Phocæa, where he met with Thestorides, a schoolmaster, whom he permitted to copy his verses as a repayment for his subsistence; not suspecting the villany which lay concealed under the cloak of civility. The object of Thestorides was to pass them off as his own, and thereby to increase his fame and fortune: and to a certain extent he succeeded; as the sequel will show. It is as

serted by some, that while Homer lived with Thestorides he wrote the Lesser Iliad; but this is denied by Aristotle, who does not even allow of his being its author. The man, who had thus made Homer his dupe, having at length succeeded in his stratagem of transcribing the verses, stole secretly from Phocæa, and commenced a school at Chios, where his credit increased through the pilfered talents of Homer who, afterwards, discovered the place of his retreat, and was anxious to pursue him. No ships being at that time bound for Chios, he set sail for Erythræa. Here also he found no ships ready to sail for Chios; and the fishermen refused him a passage: till, being driven back by a tempest, which Homer told them was the consequence of their refusal, they adImitted him into the vessel. He reached the land in safety, and was received into the hut of a goatherd, whom he had met as he proceeded from the shore, and to whom he narrated his afflictions. He was shortly after engaged by Bolissus, the master of the goatherd, to superintend his sons; and during this period, he composed the "Battle of the Frogs and Mice," and some other lighter poems. Then pursuing

Thestorides, he departed for Chios, and found that the robber of his verses, aware of his being so close a neighbour, had taken advantage of the first fleet. Homer, nevertheless, continued at Chios, erected a school, and married. And now it was that he composed those works which have distinguished him as the first of poets. Herein he mentioned some of those, from whom he had received obligations-thus he gives the name of Mentor (the person to whom he was recommended in Ithaca,) to one of his characters, and Phemius and Mentes are not unnoticed.

Now was the sun of Homer's fortune begining to shine, and his fame to become extended. Submitting to persuasion, he left his school again, and sailed for Samos: and in the ensuing spring, started for Athens, and landed at Cos; where he became seriously ill, and shortly afterwards died. It is recorded by some, that his death was occasioned by a riddle, which was put to him by some fishermen, who found him on the grass by the shore: the words are these: leaving what's took; what we took not, we bring: which he not being able to expound, died of grief. It may be unnecessary to say that this has been

oftener written than credited. Plutarch, in his life of Suetonius, speaks of two cities, Ios and Smyrna, the one as being supposed the place of Homer's nativity, and the other that of his death. From such varying particulars, the reader must now be convinced of the true connexion which our comparison of the Sisyphean labour bears to the task of deciding upon Homer's life. The greatest uncertainty prevails throughout the whole subject: neither the place nor period of his birth, nor of his death, can be confidently ascertained.

TRANSLATIONS OF THE POETS.

INTELLIGENT men of no scholarship, on reading Horace, for instance, and Ariosto, through the medium of translation, have often wondered how those writers obtained their glory. And they well might. The translations. are no more like the original than a walkingstick is like a flowering bough. It is the same with the versions of Euripides, of Eschylus, of Sophocles, of Theocritus, of Petrarch, &c. &c., and, in many respects, of Homer. Perhaps we could not give the reader a more brief yet complete specimen of the way in which bad

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translations are made, than by selecting a wellknown passage from Shakspeare, and turning it into the common-place kind of poetry that flourished so widely among us till of late years. Take the passage, for instance, where the lovers in the "Merchant of Venice" seat themselves on a bank by moonlight:—

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness, and the night,
Become the touches of sweet harmony."

Now, a foreign translator, of the ordinary kind, would dilute and take all taste and freshness out of this draught of poetry, in a style amounting to the following:

With what charms, the moon, serene and bright,
Lends on this bank its soft reflected light!

Sit we, I pray; and let us sweetly hear
The strains melodious with a raptur'd ear;
For soft retreats, and night's impressive hour,
To harmony impart divinest power.

It will be our business, where a quotation from the foreign poets occurs to us, to do at any rate a little better than this: and the English reader will have a better idea of the love