Inquire what regimen I kept, What gave me ease, and how I slept; Than all the snivellers round my bed. The lamentations of his female friends over their cards will amuse you, as one of his happiest conversation-pieces. The greater part of the poem is devoted to the justification of his character and conduct; and, unless you have acquainted yourself with his life, will not greatly interest you. Indeed, I recollect reading it with greater pleasure in the earlier editions, when there was less detail of this kind. So much may suffice for an author who, upon the whole, is regarded rather as a man of wit than as a poet. Though inimitable in one style of writing, his excellence is limited to that style. His works are extremely amusing, but the pleasure we take in them is abated by a vein of malignity which is too apparent even when he is most sportive. Farewell! LETTER VII. MY DEAR MARY, You doubtless bear in mind, perhaps with some little chagrin, that I tore you, as it were, from the perusal of one of our most charming poets, precisely at the time when it was becoming peculiarly interesting to you. I then gave you the reason for such an exercise of discipline; and I am persuaded you now feel the benefit of having been introduced to various modes of poetic excellence, before your taste was too firmly fixed upon one. I should probably take you a still wider excursion before returning to the volumes of POPE, did I not wish to engage you in the study (do not be alarmed at the word!) of one of his great performances, for the purpose of enlarging your acquaintance with poetic history; that is, with the per sonages, sonages, human and divine, and the incidents, which are so frequently alluded to in modern as well as in antient poetry. I refer to his translation of Homer's "Iliad," a work of remote antiquity, which stands at the head of epic poetry, and has a greater share of fame accumulated around it than perhaps any other literary composition. The Trojan war, its heroes and its gods, are a common fund upon which all poets draw at pleasure. They furnish an inexhaustible store for simile, allusion, parody, and other poetical uses; and every writer takes it for granted that all the circumstances belonging to them are perfectly familiar to his reader. Moreover, the whole frame of the epic, as a species of composition, is modelled upon the Iliad of Homer, and its companion the Odyssey; whence the perusal of one or both of these pieces ought to precede that of all later productions of the same class. Pope's translations of Homer have always been esteemed as first-rate perform ances ances of the kind; and indeed, no poetical versions surpass them in beauty of versification and elegance and splendour of diction. They are faithful, too, as far as to the substance of the originals; they neither omit nor add circumstances of narrative or similes, and they adhere to the general sense of the Greek in speeches and sentiments. But with respect to the dress and colouring, it must be confessed that Pope and Homer differ in all the points that discriminate the writers of an age of refinement from those of an age of simplicity. The antient bard, though lofty in his diction where the subject is elevated, relates common things in plain language, is sometimes coarse and frequently dry, and has many passages which exhibit nothing of the poet but a sonorous versification. The translator, on the other hand, never forgets that he is to support the dignity of modern heroics: and though he has too much judgment to scatter ornament with a lavish hand; yet, to soften what is harsh, to to raise what is low, to enrich what is poor, and to animate what is insipid, are accommodations to a cultivated taste which he does not scruple to employ. The manner of Homer is therefore lost in Pope's representation of him; and one whose object is to know how a poet wrote three thousand years ago, must have recourse to some version formed upon different principles of this kind a very good one has been given by the late excellent and lamented Cowper. But as an English poem, Pope's is certainly an admirable work; and you will derive from it all the instruction on account of which I am now principally recommending it, while at the same time you are improving your relish for the beauties of verse. The Odyssey, though less poetical in the original than the Iliad, and less indebted to the care of the translator, who employed two inferior hands to assist him in his labour, is not less worthy of your attention, on account of the more minute |