PROFESSOR MARGOLIOUTH'S ANAGRAMS.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sin,—The reviewer of my work, The Homer of Aristotle, in your columns, to whom I cannot be sufficiently grateful, dates that I am fitted to hold my own in any argument, if allowed a hearing. I hope that may be so ; and if I should be assailed by any serious critic with legitimate weapons, I should beg leave to reply, either to admit the objection, if sound, or to refute it, if unsound. I see no occasion to answer any criticism which fails to satisfy these conditions, and Mr. R. J. Walker's letter does not satisfy them. Perhaps I may illustrate what is meant by legitimate weapons.
Aristophanes charges the prologue of the Choephoroe with obscurity and tautology. No one has ever been able to remove these ; and had Aeschylus been alive at the time, a reply might reasonably have been expected from him. The prologues of Euripides are for the most part similarly liable to objection, as the hosts of emendations offered show ; but the weapon employed by Aristophanes is illegitimate, since it consists in substituting nonsense of his own for the words of Euripides. There would have been no occasion for Euripides to reply. Similarly I feel no responsibility for Mr. Walker's verses, though I am prepared to consider objections to my own. Aristophanes might well have defended his buffoonery on the ground that it was in place in a- comedy.' But the same defence would not serve in a philological discussion.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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