r. Ings "_envy_" Mr. Phillips when
he asked him, "How came your Pyrrhus to drive oxen and say, I am
_goaded_ on by love?" This question silenced poor Phillips; but it no
more proceeded from "envy" than did Pope's ridicule. Did he envy
Swift? Did he envy Bolingbroke? Did he envy Gay the unparalleled
success of his "Beggar's Opera?" We may be answered that these were
his friends--true: but does _friendship_ prevent _envy_? Study the
first woman you meet with, or the first scribbler, let Mr. Bowles
himself (whom I acquit fully of such an odious quality) study some of
his own poetical intimates: the most envious man I ever heard of is a
poet, and a high one; besides, it is an _universal_ passion.
Goldsmith envied not only the puppets for their dancing, and broke
his shins in the attempt at rivalry, but was seriously angry because
two pretty women received more attention than he did. _This is envy;_
but where does Pope show a sign of the passion? In that case Dryden
envied the hero of his Mac Flecknoe. Mr. Bowles compares, when and
where he can, Pope with Cowper--(the same Cowper whom in his edition
of Pope he laughs at for his attachment to an old woman, Mrs. Unwin;
search and you will find it; I remember the passage, though not the
page;) in particular he requotes Cowper's Dutch delineation of a
wood, drawn up, like a seedsman's catalogue[1], with an affected
imitation of Milton's style, as burlesque as the "Splendid Shilling."
These two writers, for Cowper is no poet, come into comparison in one
great work, the translation of Homer. Now, with all the great, and
manifest, and manifold, and reproved, and acknowledged, and
uncontroverted faults of Pope's translation, and all the scholarship,
and pains, and time, and trouble, and blank verse of the other, who
can ever read Cowper? and who will ever lay down Pope, unless for the
original? Pope's was "not Homer, it was Spondanus;" but Cowper's is
not Homer either, it is not even Cowper. As a child I first read
Pope's Homer with a rapture which no subsequent work could ever
afford, and children are not the worst judges of their own language.
As a boy I read Homer in the original, as we have all done, some of
us by force, and a few by favour; under which description I come is
nothing to the purpose, it is enough that I read him. As a man I have
tried to read Cowper's version, and I found it impossible. Has any
human reader ever succeeded?

[Footnote 1: I will submit to Mr. Bowle