a Indian Director must take his chance for a writership with the nephews of everybody else. When once the change was shown to be salutary in theory, no one could doubt that it would be excellent in practice. But it is far otherwise with schemes for the improvement of the representation of the country. For representative government is means, not an end. The end of all government is that the nation governed should enjoy as much happiness, security, and freedom, as can be obtained by human means. The best government is that which administers speedy and impartial justice; which maintains the dignity of the country abroad; which guarantees to every man the enjoyment and disposal of his property, and the most perfect freedom of thought and action; finally, which employs for these objects the cheapest and most effective machinery possible. There is no beauideal of representative government. That system of representation is the best which provides the best House of Commons, and which is generally acceptable to the country at large. In all the great changes which from time to time have been made in the English constitution the associations and prejudices of the mass of the people have been very tenderly treated; and it is to this that our constitution principally owes its stability. Our legislators have never thought it sufficient that a plan should be perfect in theory. It must also be such as to assimilate readily with the feelings of the nation. A scheme of representation which distributed power in the most exquisite proportion between the various classes, but which was not regarded with respect and pride by the mass of the people, would meet with little favour in the eyes of English statesmen. Our representative system is, theoretically, far from the best that the world has seen. There have been better in America, in Italy, in Spain; there have been a dozen better in France. Its incontestable superiority consists in the simple fact that it works well. Is it certain would work still better? The reverence which is almost universally felt for our existing Parliamentary system affords no reason for neglecting to improve it; but it does afford a very good reason for improving it gradually, and with caution. The Reform Bill of 1831 was no scheme of theorists. It was introduced for the purpose of remedying a grievance of terrible magnitude. A vast mass of power, of wealth, of intelligence, was destitute of its just influence on the conduct of public affairs. The pressure of that mass broke through the arbitrary and unequal barriers which fenced round the constitution of England. Those barriers were replaced by others, which, inasmuch as they were more fair and commodious, soon came to be regarded with equal veneration, and far greater affection. When the barriers, which are now fair and commodious, become, in the course and chance of time, unjust and oppressive, then, and not till then, let a sweeping change be undertaken. The one and only motive for an alteration in a system of representation should be that such an alteration is loudly called for by large and influential classes. That is the only safe test of the expediency and necessity of Parliamentary Reform. No class of men are more dangerous than those who are for ever inciting others to exert privileges which they do not really value, and sometimes do not even possess Mr. Bright, when he succeeded in making the English people think, during several years, that they earnestly desired Radical Reform, resembled nothing so much as a country attorney, who is perpetually striving to induce his neighbours to claim a right of way which they would never care to use. It would be hard to conceive a greater misfortune for England than that her pilots, seeing many of the crew entranced by the strains of the Siren of Birmingham, should have themselves guided, with unwilling and trembling hand, the illfated ship of the State through a seething surge of bunkum on to the reefs of caucus and universal suffrage. ENGLISH HEXAMETERS: MR. DART'S TRANSLATION OF THE ILIAD.1 BY THE REV. DR. WHEWELL. WE have here an English hexameter version of Homer's Iliad, half of which is now given us and the other half promised. It is plain that such a performance has to fight its way to acceptance through strong adverse opinions. The Dean of Canterbury, allowing that the hexameter, as the mode of translating Homer, has every consideration in its favour but one, adds: "Still, the objection against the hexameter is, in my opinion, a fatal one. It "is not an English metre, and it never will be. All that has been done to naturalize "it has entirely failed. The scholar can read it and enjoy it, but then it is on "account of his knowledge of it in Greek and Latin. But the merely English "reader can make nothing of it." Dr. Alford's authoritative dictum, that "it is not an English metre, and it never will be," might strike with dismay Mr. Dart and others who, like him, have attempted or are attempting to give Homer to the English reader in the measure of the original, if he had not given his reasons for this prophecy. But probably Mr. Dart knows, as all who have read English hexameters without prejudice, and noted their effect upon other readers and hearers, know, that the facts are altogether at variance with Dr. Alford's statement. So far from all attempts to naturalize this measure having failed, it has been employed in several original poems which have very recently appeared, and which are very popular "Evangeline," "The Bothie of Toper-na Fuosich," and "Miles Standish"-besides innumerable translations from the German, and translations of part of Homer, which have had many admirers. So far from its being "the scholar who can read it and enjoy it," and this on account of his knowledge of it in Greek and Latin, it is precisely the scholar who will not enjoy or tolerate it; and who, rejecting the best specimens of it (for instance, "Evangeline "), because they do not conform to Greek and Latin rules, demands a kind of hexameter in English which mere English ears will not tolerate. It is this demand "of the scholar" for "Virgilian" hexameters which has, from the time of Sydney and Spenser to the present time, prevented this measure being accepted by the mere English reader, as it is accepted by the mere German reader since the time of Klopstock. So far from its being true that the merely English reader can make nothing of it, the merely English reader-ladies, and children even, who have a feeling for rhythm, and who have not the prejudices or the biases of "the scholar" to prevent themread hexameters as readily as other kinds of verse, and write them as well. So far, therefore, Mr. Dart has nothing to fear from Dr. Alford's argument, however much he may be in danger of failure from having to encounter the prejudices which the Dean's dictum expresses; and, it may be, from not having himself got quite rid of those prejudices. 66 How strong these prejudices are we may learn further from a clever article in a highly respected contemporary.2 The writer of this article quotes a passage of the Iliad translated by our late lamented Dr. Hawtrey-"Helen on the Walls of Troy ;" and he adds, "Now, I admit "that there is a certain grace here, even in the versification, and that for ten or "twelve lines it is not an unpleasant kind of canter; but I doubt whether a dozen "of the same would be agreeable." Now, I think we could not have a clearer proof how much the dislike to English hexameters arises from the fastidiousness of the classical scholar; for here is one such judge who, unable to find fault with these 1 "The Iliad of Homer, in English Hex meter Verse," by J. Henry Dart, M.A. 2 Fraser's Magazine, June, 1861, p. 707. And yet he might have known that the same accomplished scholar who wrote these translated into lines as good as these a great part of the Sixth Book of the Iliad; and he might He might have known that have tried how many of them he could bear to read. Mr. Lockhart, a writer in fineness of ear inferior to none, had translated, perhaps even better than Dr. Hawtrey, the Parting of Hector and Andromache; and had translated also into hexameters (in Blackwood's Magazine for 1837), the First and the Last Books of the Iliad. (The signature N. N. T. denotes John Gibson Lockhart.) That the ear of the merely English reader is not sickened by a long course of such verses, is seen in the popularity of "Evangeline," and especially of "The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich," which continues to please, notwithstanding that many of the lines are of a most barbarous and dissonant kind, suggested apparently by the Even the writer in Fraser himself allows this, for author's love of the grotesque. eleven lines, is sure that he would be tired with a dozen more. he gives this couplet to Longfellow : "Longfellow most pleases me: no trouble his quantity gives me, Each verse bounding along like a ship that bounds through the waters." But, in opposition to hexameters of this kind, which read themselves, he puts what he calls the "Virgilian measure," of which he gives this example : 1- | —~ division, "Virgil my model is: accent, cæsura, division, His practice regulates: his laws my quantity obeyeth." Now these verses do not read themselves, because they require us to say accent, practice, whereas the natural pronunciation is accent, practice. Such hexameters are not acceptable to the ordinary English ear, and are only tolerable to those who have been accustomed to force the accent in order to mark the quantity, as schoolboys are often taught to do. I speak of the accent of modern English pronunciation as representing the quantity of the ancient measures, and so we must speak; for the modern ear (except by artificial classical training) does not recognise any versification except that which depends essentially upon accent, and can only recognise the ancient rhythms and measures by substituting accent for quantity. It is in vain, then, that J.S. says to the writers of English hexameters :— endeavour "Yours on accents false goes hobbling. Vain your The hexametrist answers: "That is perfectly true, so far as the essence of verse " is regarded. We do not want to distinguish long from short, in order that the verse should be verse, hexameter, or other." But we have need to distinguish long from short, in order to make our verses strong, smooth, light, instead of feeble, rough, heavy; and this, in other measures quite as much as in the hexameters. Thus, if we take Mr. Arnold's own example, which is not at all a happy application of his theory, the first line is : "So shone forth in the front of Troy by the bed of Xanthus." It cannot be denied that front of and bed of, two trochees which do duty for the spondees of the classical hexameter, are feeble, in consequence of the extreme lightness of the second syllable of each. The verse is a verse, but a bad verse. At every step of discussion on this subject we are reminded how it has been entangled by the attempts made to identify modern hexameters, which must proceed by accent, with ancient hexameters, which were founded on quantity. I have said, "the trochees which do duty for spondees," for we cannot have spondees as a regular element of the verse, though we may have spondees, or something very near to spondees, interspersed occasionally with good effect. But verse implies alternation of strong and weak syllables; and hence a series of spondees would not be verse; except indeed that they would have an alternate stress, arising from the musical accent, as a series of equal notes in music would have a rhythm arising from the accent which falls in the beginning of each bar. But in general, in English verse, trochees do duty for spondees. Yet in hexameters the trochee is still so used as to be, in the general balance of rhythm, the equivalent of the dactyl; and thus its weak syllable is to be equivalent to the two weak syllables of the dactyl And when the second syllable of trochees is very light, the line does not cease to be a hexameter line (for the six accents or strong syllables make it so), but it becomes a bad and feeble line. It used to be said that we cannot have hexameters in English, because we have no spondees. To which it was answered, that we can have abundant spondees, as, for instance : 66 Tityrus, blest youth, lies in the broad shade under a green tree." But that in our modern verse it is not well to use such spondees regularly, as I have said; and that in reading ancient verse rhythmically, no less than modern verse, we lay a stress on the first syllable of the foot, and thus make it a trochee. The writer to whom I refer says further of the English hexameters, to which he gives his unwilling commendation, "I deny altogether that the metrical movement has any resemblance whatever to that of the Greek lines." To this denial I do not know what we can answer, except that to us, and to the writer of the English lines, and to all the other persons who have written English hexameters, and to those who have admired them, who are no small number, the metrical movement of the Greek (as we read it) and of the English is the same. I should like to have the experiment made by reading the two passages to an English woman, who, with no preconceived notions about feet and pauses, and accents and quantities, had a good ear for verse; or to a foreigner who, possessing accented verse in his own language, understood neither Greek nor English. But the writer, further to illustrate his meaning, gives a translation of the same passage in blank verse, and says: "I should expect that" it "would give anybody "who was not acquainted with the Greek measure a much better idea of what it is "like to me." Now there is a clear and broad difference between iambic verse (or blank verse) and dactylic verse, which I should expect would strike any one except the writer of whom we are speaking. It has struck a writer in the Times, on this subject, who thus speaks: "It makes all the difference in the world in "the spirit and motion of a verse whether its accentuation is at the beginning or at the end of the feet. It is impossible to give to the iambics the liveliness "and rapidity of dactyls or trochees. It is impossible to give to pure dactyls "the solemnity and weight of the iambics." And hence the gait of all hexameters, Greek, Latin, German, or English, if there be any considerable proportion of dactyls in them, must be susceptible of being described as "a canter," which the writer, as we have seen, applies as if it were something peculiar to this measure in English. In our hexameters, it is absolutely necessary to the essence of the verse that it shall begin with a long, that is, with a strong syllable. Southey, in the preface to his "Vision of Judgment," theoretically denies this; but practically, in the poem itself, he has not introduced more than four or five examples of his perverse doctrine, whatever other faults may be found in that unfortunate experiment. It must appear, from the facts which I have adduced, to which many more may be added, that there is an extensive and growing conviction that Homer ought to be translated into English hexameters. If this be done, if the verses run easily, the English be good, and the version faithful, such a translation may reasonably expect to obtain a currency which will disprove, by the fact, all assertions and prophecies that the hexameter is not an English measure, and never will be. We, therefore, look with great interest on all attempts at such a performance, and we turned to Mr. Dart's essay with goodwill, as well as with curiosity. We will attempt to give our readers some notion of the merits and defects of the work. I will take a well-known passage in the First Book, and give Lockhart's and Mr. Dart's translations; and first Lockhart: "Then did Achilles begin to reproach Agamemnon Atrides' Hotly with venomous words, for as yet unappeas'd was his anger. Bloated with wine! having eyes like a dog, but the heart of a she-deer! Courage exalted thy soul: this seems to thee courtship of death-doom; Robbing of guerdon achiev'd whosoe'er contradicts thee in presence. Else, Agamemnon, to-day would have witness'd the last of thy outrage; This speech Mr. Dart thus renders : 66 Dog as thou art in face; tame at heart as the deer of the forest; Sot of a king!--when wert thou ever seen 'mid the braves of Achaia, Winning the spoils of the foe? Not for thee such uncertain encounters; Were they not such, Atrides, thy pride had ere this been abated! (a) But hear me now, O king, and mark the great oath I am swearing !— Bear it as sign of sway; ay! deep is the oath I am swearing ;"-&c. I think we may allow that in this passage Mr. Dart's version is more simple and direct, and therefore more Homeric, than that of his predecessor. But there are in his versification some faults of the kind, which, as I have mentioned, are most intolerable; namely, lines beginning with a light syllable, such as the four lines marked (a). The reader will perceive that these are really hexameters, only by omitting the first syllable; thus: "Range the wide camp of Achaia, and pilfer from those that oppose thee; In some of these cases Mr. Dart, perhaps, meant to force the lines into a dactylic |