_Odyssey_. Well might he write in later life--

'Since, thanks to Homer, I do live and thrive.'

Pope was amongst the first of prosperous authors, and heads the clan of
cunning fellows who have turned their lyrical cry into consols, and their
odes into acres.

Of the merits of this great work it is not necessary to speak at length.
Mr. Edmund Yates tells a pleasant story of how one day, when an old
school Homer lay on his table, Shirley Brooks sauntered in, and taking
the book up, laid it down again, dryly observing:

'Ah! I see you have _Homer's_ Iliad! Well, I believe it is the best.'
And so it is. Homer's Iliad is the best, and Pope's Homer's Iliad is the
second best. Whose is the third best is controversy.

Pope knew next to no Greek, but then he did not work upon the Greek text.
He had Chapman's translation ever at his elbow, also the version of John
Ogilby, which had appeared in 1660--a splendid folio, with illustrations
by the celebrated Hollar. Dryden had not got farther than the first book
of the _Iliad_, and a fragment of the sixth book. A faithful rendering
of the exact sense of Homer is not, of course, to be looked for. In the
first book Pope describes the captive maid Briseis as looking back. In
Homer she does not look back, but in Dryden she does; and Pope followed
Dryden, and did not look, at all events, any farther back.

But what really is odd is that in Cowper's translation Briseis looks back
too. Now, Cowper had been to a public school, and consequently knew
Greek, and made it his special boast that, though dull, he was faithful.
It is easy to make fun of Pope's version, but true scholars have seldom
done so. Listen to Professor Conington {76}:--

'It has been, and I hope still is, the delight of every intelligent
schoolboy. They read of kings, and heroes, and mighty deeds in
language which, in its calm majestic flow, unhasting, unresting,
carries them on as irresistibly as Homer's own could do were they born
readers of Greek, and their minds are filled with a conception of the
heroic age, not indeed strictly true, but almost as near the truth as
that which was entertained by Virgil himself.'

Mr. D. G. Rossetti, himself both an admirable translator and a
distinguished poet, has in effect laid down the first law of rhythmical
translation thus: 'Thou shalt not turn a good poem into a bad one.' Pope
kept this law.

Pope was a great adept at working upon other