Item 88 - William Whewell to Julius Charles Hare

JCH's hexameters arrived just as he is to begin printing [Dialogues on English Hexameters, 1847]. 'I should like much to have some of Schiller's [Friedrich Schiller] Epigrams. I have myself translated 'Columbus' and 'Odysseus' which I shall insert, and I shall be much obliged for any which you can give me soon'. It was not WW who submitted the translation of Homer to the Blackwood [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine]. He has tried to put it into English hexameters but has never been satisfied with the result. If JCH wants to give WW a specimen of his Homer: 'it will add to the interest of the collection and answer my purpose of showing how familiar to cultured men the English rhythm is'. Can JCH recommend a 'good discussion of the question of Church and State as it effects the continental nations, Germany and France'. WW must rewrite that part of his work in morality entirely [The Elements of Morality, Including Polity, 2 vols., 1845]: 'One improvement in the mode of treating the subject will be to avoid the word 'Church' altogether'. WW has of course 'Bunsen's [Christian C. J. Bunsen] 'Church of the future' but that is not a general view of the question'. [Frederick Apthorp] Paley has been told to give up his rooms at St. John's College [see WW to JCH, 26 Oct. 1846]. Thomas Worsley is printing his second volume of his Christian advocate's book [see WW to JCH, 3 Nov. 1845]: 'The style is much better and simpler than it was in the first; the matter still to my thinking very vague and dreamy'.