πέπλον μὲν κατέχευεν ἑανὸν πατρὸς ἐτ’ οὔδει?
I have digressed: I return to words which have been misunderstood. A second word is of more importance, _Imp_; which properly means a Graft. The best translation of ὦ Λήδας ἔρνος to my mind, is, ‘O Imp of Leda’! for neither ‘bud of Leda’, nor ‘scion of Leda’ satisfy me: much less ‘sprig’ or ‘shoot of Leda’. The theological writers so often used the phrase ‘imp of Satan’ for ‘child of the devil’, that (since Bunyan?) the vulgar no longer understand that _imp_ means _scion_, _child_, and suppose it to mean ‘little devil’. A Reviewer has omitted to give his unlearned readers any explanation of the word (though I carefully explained it) and calls down their indignation upon me by his censures, which I hope proceeded from carelessness and ignorance.
Even in Spenser’s Fairy Queen the word retains its rightful and noble sense:
Well worthy _imp_! then said the lady, etc.,
‘He took upon him to protect him from them all, and not to suffer so goodly an _imp_ [Alcibiades] to lose the good fruit of his youth’.
Dryden uses the verb, To imp; to graft, insert.
I was quite aware that I claimed of my readers a certain strength of mind, when I bid them to forget the defilements which vulgarity has shed over the noble word Imp, and carry their imaginations back two or three centuries: but I did not calculate that any critic would call Dainty grotesque. This word is equivalent in meaning to Delicate and Nice, but has precisely the epical character in which both those words are deficient. For instance, I say, that after the death of Patroclus, the coursers ‘stood motionless’,
Drooping tōwārd the ground their heads, and down their plaintive eyelids Did warm tears trickle to the ground, their charioteer bewailing. Defilèd were their _dainty_ manes, over the yoke-strap dropping.
A critic who objects to this, has to learn English from my translation. Does he imagine that Dainty can mean nothing but ‘over-particular as to food’?
In the compound Dainty-cheek’d, Homer shows his own epic peculiarity. It is imitated in the similar word εὐπάρᾳος applied to the Gorgon Medusa by Pindar: but not in the Attics. I have somewhere read, that the rudest conception of female beauty is that of a brilliant red _plump_ cheek; such as an English clown admires (was this what Pindar meant?); the second stage looks to the delicacy of tint in the cheek (this is Homer’s καλλιπάρῃος:) the third looks to shape (this is the εὒμορφος of the Attics, the _formosus_ of the Latins, and is seen in the Greek sculpture); the fourth and highest looks to moral expression: this is the idea of Christian Europe. That Homer rests exclusively in the second or semibarbaric stage, it is not for me to say, but, as far as I am able, to give to the readers of my translation materials for their own judgment. From the vague word εἶδος, _species_, _appearance_, it cannot be positively inferred whether the poet had an eye for Shape. The epithets curl-eyed and fine-ankled decidedly suggest that he had; except that his application of the former to the entire nation of the Greeks makes it seem to be of foreign tradition, and as unreal as brazen-_mailed_.