I am afraid you will hardly accept
this; I do not see how you can be expected to do so, for in the
first place there is no even tolerable prose translation, and in the
second, the Odyssey, like the Iliad, has been a school book for over
two thousand five hundred years, and what more cruel revenge than
this can dullness take on genius? The Iliad and Odyssey have been
used as text-books for education during at least two thousand five
hundred years, and yet it is only during the last forty or fifty
that people have begun to see that they are by different authors.
There was, indeed, so I learn from Colonel Mure's valuable work, a
band of scholars some few hundreds of years before the birth of
Christ, who refused to see the Iliad and Odyssey as by the same
author, but they were snubbed and snuffed out, and for more than two
thousand years were considered to have been finally refuted. Can
there be any more scathing satire upon the value of literary
criticism? It would seem as though Minerva had shed the same thick
darkness over both the poems as she shed over Ulysses, so that they
might go in and out among the dons of Oxford and Cambridge from
generation to generation, and none should see them.
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