t L9,000,
and it is said to have made at the same time the fortune of his
publisher. Pope, I believe, was the first poet who, without the aid of
patronage or of the stage, was able to live in comfort from the sale of
his works.

He knew how to value money, but fame was dearer to him than wealth, and
of both he had now enough to satisfy his ambition. Posterity has not
endorsed the general verdict of his contemporaries on his famous
translation. He had to encounter indeed some severe comments, and
Richard Bentley, the greatest classical scholar then living, must have
vexed the sensitive poet when he told him that his version was a pretty
poem but he must not call it Homer. By this criticism, however, as
Matthew Arnold has observed, the work is judged in spite of all its
power and attractiveness. Pope wants Homer's simplicity and directness,
and his artifices of style are utterly alien to the Homeric spirit. Dr.
Johnson quotes the judgment of critics who say that Pope's _Homer_
'exhibits no resemblance of the original and characteristic manner of
the Father of Poetry, as it wants his awful simplicity, his artless
grandeur, his unaffected majesty,' and observes that this cannot be
totally denied. He argues, however, that even in Virgil's time the
demand for elegance had been so much increased that mere nature could be
endured no longer, that every age improves in elegance, that if some
Ovidian graces are, alas! not to be found in the English _Iliad_ 'to
have added can be no great crime if nothing be taken away.' Johnson was
not aware that to add 'poetical elegances' to the words and thoughts of
a great poet is to destroy much of the beauty of his verse and many of
its most striking characteristics. As well might he say that the beauty
of a lovely woman can be enhanced by a profusion of trinkets, or that a
Greek statue would be more worthy of admiration if it were elegantly
dressed. Dr. Johnson says, with perfect truth, that Pope wrote for his
own age, and it may be added that he exhibits extraordinary art in
ministering to the taste of the age; yet it is hardly too much to affirm
that in the exercise of his craft as a translator he is continually
false to nature and therefore false to Homer.

On the other hand his _Iliad_ if read as a story runs so smoothly, that
the reader, and especially the young reader, is carried through the
narrative without any sense of fatigue. It is not a little praise to say
that it is a poem wh