ers or Grub Street reviewers,
saw both Pope's _Iliad_ and Homer's _Iliad_ through the medium of
eighteenth-century taste. Even Dennis's onslaught, which begins with a
violent contradiction of the hackneyed tribute quoted above, leaves the
impression that its vigor comes rather from personal animus than from
distrust of existing literary standards or from any new and individual
theory of translation.

With the romantic movement, however, comes criticism which presents to
us Pope's _Iliad_ as seen in the light of common day instead of through
the flattering illusions which had previously veiled it. New translators
like Macpherson and Cowper, though too courteous to direct their attack
specifically against the great Augustan, make it evident that they have
adopted new standards of faithfulness and that they no longer admire
either the diction or the versification which made Pope supreme among
his contemporaries. Macpherson gives it as his opinion that, although
Homer has been repeatedly translated into most of the languages of
modern Europe, "these versions were rather paraphrases than faithful
translations, attempts to give the spirit of Homer, without the
character and peculiarities of his poetry and diction," and that
translators have failed especially in reproducing "the magnificent
simplicity, if the epithet may be used, of the original, which can never
be characteristically expressed in the antithetical quaintness of modern
fine writing."[453] Cowper's prefaces show that he has given serious
consideration to all the opinions of the theorists of his century, and
that his own views are fundamentally opposed to those generally
professed. His own basic principle is that of fidelity to his author,
and, like every sensible critic, he sees that the translator must
preserve a mean between the free and the close methods. This approval of
compromise is not, however, a mere formula; Cowper attempts to throw
light upon it from various angles. The couplet he immediately repudiates
as an enemy to fidelity. "I will venture to assert that a just
translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible," he declares.
"No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet
with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense of
his original. The translator's ingenuity, indeed, in this case becomes
itself a snare, and the readier he is at invention and expedient, the
more likely he is to be betrayed into the w