with his imperfect learning would have ventured on an' original life of Homer, and whether it was not safer to leave it in Parnell's hands. Every page of Pope's Homer shows equally his poetical genius, and his want of scholarship. I have no doubt that he set a high value on Parnell's assistance, and that it was of essential service to him in understanding his author; but no assistance of friends, learned enough and anxious to assist him, could supply his own deficiencies in classical taste and knowledge; Pope was never wanting in vigilance and industry; he consulted the commentators as to what was difficult or doubtful, and he borrowed from the former translators when they were happy and successful in their expression; but he never caught the manner, or imbibed the spirit of his original; for he had never studied the language in which it was written.[1] I consider Pope's
- ↑ The difficulties attending a translation of Homer exist, though in a graduated scale, in the attempts to reflect in our language the style and character of the other Grecian poets. These principally arise from the different structure, and great inferiority of our language, by which a translator is placed between two difficulties. He must either endeavour to raise his poetical language to the power of the original, and emulate through the dull and horny medium of the Gothic, the transparent and crystal beauty of the Greek, which will lead him, as it did Pope, to superfluous and perhaps cumbrous embellishment; or if he attempts, like Cowper, to give a fac-simile of his original, he will find his own inferior language unable to support him,—what was plain, with him will become flat, the simple will be naked and bald,
