, and so skilfully did
they catch Pope's style that it is almost impossible to discern any
difference between his work and theirs. The literary partnership led to
one of Pope's discreditable manoeuvres, in which, strange to say, he
was assisted by Broome, whom he induced to set his name to a falsehood.
Pope as we have said, translated twelve books, while eight were allotted
to Broome and four to Fenton. Yet he led Broome, unknown to his
colleague, to ascribe only three books to himself and two to Fenton, and
at the same time the poet, who confessed that he could 'equivocate
pretty genteely,' stated the amount he had paid for Broome's eight books
as if it had been paid for three. The story is disgraceful both to Pope
and Broome, and why the latter should have practised such a deception is
unaccountable. He was a beneficed clergyman and a man of wealth, so that
he could not have lied for money even if Pope had been willing to bribe
him. Fenton was indignant, as he well might be, but he was too lazy or
too good-natured to expose the fraud. Broome had his deserts later on,
but Pope, who ridiculed him in the _Dunciad_, and in his _Treatise on
the Bathos_, was the last man in the world entitled to render them.

The partnership in poetry which produced the _Odyssey_ was not a great
literary success, and most readers will prefer the version of Cowper,
whose blank verse, though out of harmony with the rapid movement of the
_Iliad_ is not unfitted for the quieter beauties of the _Odyssey_.

In 1721, prior to the publication of his version, the poet had agreed to
edit an edition of Shakespeare, a task as difficult as any which a man
of letters can undertake. Pope was not qualified to achieve it. He was
comparatively ignorant of Elizabethan literature, the dry labours of an
editor were not to his taste, and he lacked true sympathy with the
genius of the poet. Failure was therefore inevitable, and Theobald, who
has some solid merits as a commentator, found it easy to discern and to
expose the errors of Pope. For doing so he was afterwards 'hitched' into
the _Dunciad_, and made in the first instance its hero. The
"Shakespeare" was published in 1725 in six volumes quarto. 'Its chief
claim,' Mr. Courthope writes, 'to interest at the present day, is that
it forms the immediate starting-point for the long succession of Pope's
satires.... The vexation caused to the poet by the undoubted justice of
many of Theobald's strictures procured fo