are not at all Homeric, they have not the least in the world the manner of Homer. There is a celebrated incident in the nineteenth book of the Odyssey, the recognition by the old nurse Eurycleia of a scar on the leg of her master Ulysses, who has entered his own hall as an unknown wanderer, and whose feet she has been set to wash. 'Then she came near', says Homer, 'and began to wash her master; and straightway she recognised a scar which he had got in former days from the white tusk of a wild boar, when he went to Parnassus unto Autolycus and the sons of Autolycus, his mother's father and brethren'[1]. This, 'really represented' by Dr Maginn, in 'a measure similar' to Homer's, becomes:
And scarcely had she begun to wash
Ere she was aware of the grisly gash
Above his knee that lay.
It was a wound from a wild boar's tooth,
All on Parnassus' slope,
Where he went to hunt in the days of his youth
With his mother's sire,
and so on. That is the true ballad-manner, no one can deny; 'all on Parnassus' slope' is, I was going to say, the true ballad-slang; but never again shall I be able to read
νίζε δ' ἄῤ ἆσσον ἴουσα ἄναχθ' ἑόν· αὐτίκα δ' ἔγνω
οὐλήν,
- ↑ Odyssey, xix. 392.
