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 charac ters, and Phemius and Mentes are not unno ticed.

Now was the sun of Homer's fortune begin. ing to shine, and his fame to become extended Submitting to persuasion, he left his schoo 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. may be unnecessary to say that this has been

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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,

stories and other pieces of fiction which they have rendered so celebrated, in abridgements, like ours, of the utmost brevity and simplicity, than in whole volumes of this kind of misrepresentation. The simple elements of them will be laid before him; and the eye of his own unobstructed heart will see more of what the poets saw of them, at once. LEIGH HUNT.

"I SAT out in the morning, in company with a friend, to visit a place where Milton spent part of his life, and where, in all probability, he composed several of his earliest productions. It is a small village, situated on a pleasant hill, about three miles from Oxford, and called Forest-Hill, because it formerly lay contiguous to a forest, which has since been cut down. The poet chose this place of retirement, after his first marriage; and he describes the beauties of his retreat in that fine passage of the "L'Allegro:"

'Strait mine eye hath caught new pleasures,
Whilst the landscape round it measures;

Russet lawns and fallows grey,
Where the nibbling flocks do stray;
Mountains, on whose barren breast
The lab'ring clouds do often rest;
Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks, and rivers wide;
Towers and battlements it sees,
Bosom'd high in tufted trees.

Hard by, a cottage chimney smokes
From betwixt two aged oaks,-&c.'

"It was neither the proper season of the year, nor time of the day, to hear all the rural sounds, and see all the objects mentioned in this description; but, by a pleasing concurrence of circumstances, we were saluted, upon our approach to the village, with the music of the mower and his scythe; we saw the ploughman intent upon his labour; and the milkmaid returning from her country employment.

"As we ascended the hill, the variety of beautiful objects, the agreeable stillness and natural simplicity of the whole scene, gave us the highest pleasure. We, at length, reached the spot where Milton, undoubtedly, took most of his