ere taught to read for words.[12] The process was fatal to scholarship.
Ignorant, in a great degree, of the rules and idioms of the Latin
tongue, it was impossible he should translate with ease or accuracy. But
his peculiar training doubtless favoured the early development of his
poetic powers. He devoted his boyish years, when the mind was most
pliable, to the cultivation of his art, and this incessant practice of
versification from childhood was the cause of his precocious
excellence.

Pope's admiration for Statius continued throughout his later boyhood,
and he preferred him to "all the Latin poets, by much, next to
Virgil."[13] He soon began to turn the Thebais into English, and he
affirms that his version of the first book was made in 1703. In a note
to his letter to Cromwell of Jan. 22, 1709, he placed it earlier still,
and declares that it was "done when the author was but fourteen years
old." These statements convey an erroneous impression. It appears from
the correspondence with Cromwell that more than one-third of the
translation was not in existence by January, 1709, when Pope was in his
twenty-first year. The piece was not published till 1712, when it came
out in Lintot's Miscellany, and the poet at that period was twenty-four.
The portions which were not recently translated, were newly corrected,
and the whole represents the powers of the man who completed the task,
and not of the boy who commenced it.

The translation of the first book of the Thebais must be more highly
estimated as a specimen of versification than as an adequate
representation of the original. The harmony and phraseology of
particular passages are delicious, and verse and language throughout are
polished in a high degree. There is one pervading exception to Pope's
metrical skill. He has recourse incessantly to an unnatural order of
words, and especially he produces his rhymes by placing the verb after
the noun it ought to precede. Of this license Dryden says, "We were
whipped at Westminster if we used it twice together. I should judge him
to have little command of English whom the necessity of a rhyme should
force upon this rock, though sometimes it cannot easily be avoided."
Pope availed himself of the false construction with a freedom which
seriously deforms and enfeebles much of his poetry. He fell into the
error before he had discrimination to perceive the blemish, and when his
judgment was more mature habit had reconciled him to the