Pope has
beautifully imitated and improved in Eloisa), are in the genuine spirit
of poetical taste. Dr. Warton observes that this translation is superior
to any of Dryden's. If, indeed, we compare Pope's translations with
those of any other writer, their superiority must be strikingly
apparent. There is a finish in them, a correctness, a natural flow, and
a tone of originality, added to a wonderful propriety and beauty of
expression and language. If he ever fails, it is where he generalises
too much. This is particularly objectionable, where in the original
there is any marked, distinct, and beautiful picture. So, ver. 253, Pope
only says,

Cupid for thee shall spread the swelling sail;

whereas in Ovid, Cupid appears before us in the very act of guiding the
vessel, seated as the pilot, and with his _tender_ hand (_tenera manu_)
contracting, or letting flow the sail. I need not point out another
beauty in the original,--the repetition of the word _Ipse_.--BOWLES.

Richardson has appended this note to the Epistle of Sappho to Phaon in
his copy of the quarto of 1717: "Corrected by the first copy, written
out elegantly (as all his MSS.) to show friends, with their remarks in
the margin; the present reading for the most part the effect of them."
The remarks in the margin are mere exclamations, such as "pulchre,"
"bene," "optime," "recte," "bella paraphrasis," "longe praestas Scrope
meo judicio," "minus placet," &c. They are doubtless from the pen of
Cromwell, since it appeals from Pope's letter to him on June 10, 1709,
that he had jotted down the same phrases on the margin of the
translation of Statius. Bowles having quoted the observation of Warton,
"that he had seen compositions of youths of sixteen years old far beyond
the Pastorals in point of genius and imagination," adds, "I fear not to
assert that he never could have seen any compositions of boys of that
age so perfect in versification, so copious, yet so nice in expression,
so correct, so spirited, and so finished," as the translation of the
Epistle of Sappho to Phaon. The remark was made by Bowles in the belief
that the version was the production of the poet's fourteenth year. Pope
himself records on his manuscript that it was "written first 1707." He
was then nineteen, and when the Epistle was published in 1712, in
Tonson's Ovid, he was twenty-four.

"Ovid," says Dryden, "often writ too pointedly for his subject, and made
his persons speak more eloquently