It is very quaint to say, ‘the outwork (or rampart) of the teeth’ instead of ‘the lips’. If Mr Arnold will call it ‘portentous’ in my English, let him produce some shadow of reason for denying it to be portentous in Greek. Many phrases are so quaint as to be almost untranslatable, as μήστωρ φόβοιο (deviser of fear?) μήστωρ ἀϋτῆς (deviser of outcry?): others are quaint to the verge of being comical, as to call a man an _equipoise_ (ἀτάλαντος) to a god, and to praise eyes for having a _curl_ in them[45]. It is quaint to make Juno call Jupiter αἰνότατε (grimmest? direst?), whether she is in good or bad humour with him, and to call a Vision _ghastly_, when it is sent with a pleasant message. It is astonishingly quaint to tell how many oxen every fringe of Athene’s ægis was worth.—It is quaint to call Patroclus ‘a great simpleton’, for not foreseeing that he would lose his life in rushing to the rescue of his countrymen. (I cannot receive Mr Arnold’s suggested Biblical correction ‘Thou fool’! which he thinks grander: first, because grave moral rebuke is utterly out of place; secondly, because the Greek cannot mean this;—it means infantine simplicity, and has precisely the colour of the word which I have used.)—It is quaint to say: ‘Patroclus kindled a great fire, _godlike man_’! or, ‘Automedon held up the meat, _divine_ Achilles slic’d it’: quaint to address a young friend as ‘Oh[46] pippin’! or ‘Oh softheart’! or ‘Oh pet’! whichever is the true translation. It is quaint to compare Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring, Ulysses to a pet ram, Agamemnon in two lines to three gods, and in the third line to a bull; the Myrmidons to wasps, Achilles to a grampus chasing little fishes, Antilochus to a wolf which kills a dog and runs away. Menelaus striding over Patroclus’s body to a heifer defending her first-born. It is quaint to say that Menelaus was as brave as a bloodsucking fly, that Agamemnon’s sobs came thick as flashes of lightning; and that the Trojan mares, while running, groaned like overflowing rivers. All such similes come from a mind quick to discern similarities, but _very dull to feel incongruities_; unaware therefore that it is on a verge where the sublime easily turns into the ludicrous; a mind and heart inevitably quaint to the very core. What is it in Vulcan, when he would comfort his mother under Jupiter’s threat, to make jokes about the severe mauling which he himself formerly received, and his terror lest she should be now beaten? Still more quaint (if _rollicking_ is not the word), is the address by which Jupiter tries to ingratiate himself with Juno: viz. he recounts to her all his unlawful amours, declaring that in none of them was he so smitten as now. I have not enough of the γενναῖος εὐηθεία, the barbarian simple-heartedness, needed by a reader of Homer, to get through this speech with gravity. What shall I call it, certainly much worse than quaint, that the poet adds: Jupiter was more enamoured than at his _stolen_ embrace in their first bed ‘secretly from their dear parents’? But to develop Homer’s inexhaustible quaintnesses, of which Mr Arnold denies the existence, seems to me to need a long treatise. It is not to be expected, that one who is blind to superficial facts so very prominent as those which I have recounted, should retain any delicate perception of the highly coloured, intense, and very eccentric diction of Homer, even if he has ever understood it, which he forces me to doubt. He sees nothing ‘odd’ in κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, or in κυνόμυια, ‘thou dogfly’! He replaces to his imagination the flesh and blood of the noble barbarian by a dim feeble spiritless outline.