ABSTRACT
The Town and Country, as James Fraser liked to call his magazine, continued in the late 1830s to be innovative, humorous, and sometimes excessively learned, but in the reign of the new queen it more readily embraced the less politically charged satire of "Father Prout" and Thackeray. Late in 1837, William Maginn proposed to James Fraser translating Homer into ballad meters for the Town and Country, with a ballad appearing each month throughout the next year. The first of Maginn's Homer pieces to see print had been the "The Wile of Juno", which "R. T. S". sent to William Blackwood from Cork. A few years later in Knight's Quarterly Magazine, Maginn cited the Spenserian precedent of "The Wile of Juno" in the introduction to his translation of the "Batrachomyomachia" and he also translated the "Hymn to Pan". Maginn's further classical translations included four more ballads, however all from the Iliad.
