ich every school-boy will read with pleasure, and in
which every critical reader who is content to surrender his judgment for
awhile, will find pleasure also. Mr. Courthope in his elaborate and
masterly _Life of Pope_, which gives the coping stone to an exhaustive
edition of the poet's works, praises a fine passage from the _Iliad_,
which in his judgment attains perhaps the highest level of which the
heroic couplet is capable, and 'I do not believe,' he adds, 'that any
Englishman of taste and imagination can read the lines without feeling
that if Pope had produced nothing but his translation of Homer, he would
be entitled to the praise of a great original poet.'

Pope's editor could not perhaps have selected a better illustration of
his best manner than this speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus, which is
parodied in the _Rape of the Lock_. The concluding lines shall be
quoted.

'Could all our care elude the gloomy grave,
Which claims no less the fearful than the brave,
For lust of fame I should not vainly dare
In fighting fields, nor urge the soul to war,
But since, alas! ignoble age must come,
Disease, and death's inexorable doom;
The life which others pay let us bestow,
And give to fame what we to nature owe;
Brave though we fall, and honoured if we live,
Or let us glory gain, or glory give.'

We may add that neither its false glitter nor Pope's inability--shared
in great measure with every translator--to catch the spirit of the
original, can conceal the sustained power of this brilliant work. Its
merit is the more wonderful since the poet's knowledge of Greek was
extremely meagre, and he is said to have been constantly indebted to
earlier translations. Gibbon said that his _Homer_ had every merit
except that of faithfulness to the original; and Pope, could he have
heard it, might well have been satisfied with the verdict of Gray, a
great scholar as well as a great poet, that no other version would ever
equal his.

All that has been hitherto said with regard to Pope and Homer relates to
his version of the _Iliad_. On that he expended his best powers, and on
that it is evident he bestowed infinite pains. The _Odyssey_, one of the
most beautiful stories in the world, appears to have been taken up with
a weary pen, and in putting it into English he sought the assistance of
Broome and Fenton, two minor poets and Cambridge scholars. They
translated twelve books out of the twenty-four