I READ daily your political essays. I was particularly pleased with “Once a Jacobin:” though the argument is obvious enough, the style was less swelling than your things sometimes are, and it was plausible ad populum. A vessel has just arrived from Jamaica with the news of poor Sam Le Grice’s death. He died at Jamaica of the yellow fever. His course was rapid and he had been very foolish; but I believe there was more of kindness and warmth in him than in almost any other of our schoolfellows. The annual meeting of the Blues is to-morrow, at the London Tavern, where poor Sammy dined with them two years ago, and attracted the notice of all by the singular foppishness of his dress. When men go off the stage so early, it scarce seems a noticeable thing in their epitaphs, whether they had been wise or silly in their lifetime. I am glad the snuff and Pi-pos’s Books please. “Goody Two Shoes” is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery; and the shopman at Newbery’s hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs. B.’s and Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. B.’s books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the
1 See Appendix II., page 968. |
| 1802 | CHAPMAN’S HOMER | 253 |
Damn them!—I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights and Blasts of all that is Human in man and child.
As to the Translations, let me do two or three hundred lines, and then do you try the Nostrums upon Stuart in any way you please. If they go down I will bray more. In fact, if I got or could but get 50l. a year only, in addition to what I have, I should live in affluence.
Have you anticipated it, or could not you give a Parallel of Bonaparte with Cromwell, particularly as to the contrast in their deeds affecting foreign states? Cromwell’s interference for the Albigenses, B[uonaparte]’s against the Swiss. Then Religion would come in; and Milton and you could rant about our countrymen of that period. This is a hasty suggestion, the more hasty because I want my Supper. I have just finished Chapman’s Homer. Did you ever read it?—it has most the continuous power of interesting you all along, like a rapid original, of any, and in the uncommon excellence of the more finished parts goes beyond Fairfax or any of ’em. The metre is fourteen syllables, and capable of all sweetness and grandeur. Cowper’s damn’d blank verse detains you every step with some heavy Miltonism; Chapman gallops off with you his own free pace. Take a simile for an example. The council breaks up—
“Being abroad, the earth was overlaid With flockers to them, that came forth; as when of frequent bees Swarms rise out of a hollow rock, repairing the degrees Of their egression endlessly, with ever rising
new From forth their sweet nest; as their store, still as it faded,
grew, And never would cease sending forth her clusters
to the spring, They still crowd out so: this flock here, that there, belabouring The loaded flowers. So,” &c. &c. [Iliad, Book II., 70-77.] |
What endless egression of phrases the dog commands!
Take another: Agamemnon
wounded, bearing his wound heroically for the sake of the army (look below) to
a woman in labour.
| 254 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | Oct. |
“He, with his lance, sword, mighty stones, poured his heroic
wreak On other squadrons of the foe, whiles yet warm blood did break Thro’ his cleft veins: but when the wound was quite exhaust
and crude, The eager anguish did approve his princely fortitude. As when most sharp and bitter pangs distract a labouring dame, Which the divine Ilithiæ, that rule the painful frame Of human childbirth, pour on her; the Ilithiæ that are The daughters of Saturnia; with whose extreme repair The woman in her travail strives to take the worst it gives; With thought, it must be, ’tis love’s fruit, the end
for which she lives; The mean to make herself new born, what comforts will redound: So,” &c. [Iliad, Book XI., 228-239.] |
I will tell you more about Chapman and his peculiarities in my next. I am much interested in him.
Yours ever affectionately, and Pi-Pos’s.
