the rocks, and thunder to the skies.

Each phrase is either wrong or escapes from error by vagueness, and one
would swear that Pope had never seen the sea. Chapman says,--

And as when with the west wind flaws, the sea thrusts up her waves
One after other, thick and high, upon the groaning shores,
First in herself loud, but opposed with banks and rocks she roars,
And all her back in bristles set, spits every way her foam.

This is both clumsy and introduces the quaint and unauthorized image of
a pig, but it is unmistakably vivid. Pope is equally troubled when he
has to deal with Homer's downright vernacular. He sometimes ventures
apologetically to give the original word. He allows Achilles to speak
pretty vigorously to Agamemnon in the first book:--

O monster! mix'd of insolence and fear,
Thou dog in forehead, but in heart a deer!

Chapman translates the phrase more fully, but adds a characteristic
quibble:--

Thou ever steep'd in wine,
Dog's face, with heart but of a hart.

Tickell manages the imputation of drink, but has to slur over the dog
and the deer:--

Valiant with wine and furious from the bowl,
Thou fierce-look'd talker, with a coward soul.

Elsewhere Pope hesitates in the use of such plain speaking. He allows
Teucer to call Hector a dog, but apologizes in a note. "This is literal
from the Greek," he says, "and I have ventured it;" though he quotes
Milton's "dogs of hell" to back himself with a precedent. But he cannot
quite stand Homer's downright comparison of Ajax to an ass, and speaks
of him in gingerly fashion as--

The slow beast with heavy strength endued.

Pope himself thinks the passage "inimitably just and beautiful;" but on
the whole, he says, "a translator owes so much to the taste of the age
in which he lives as not to make too great a compliment to the former
[age]; and this induced me to omit the mention of the word _ass_ in the
translation." Boileau and Longinus, he tells us, would approve the
omission of mean and vulgar words. "Ass" is the vilest word imaginable
in English or Latin, but of dignity enough in Greek and Hebrew to be
employed "on the most magnificent occasions."

The Homeric phrase is thus often muffled and deadened by Pope's
verbiage. Dignity of a kind is gained at the cost of energy. If such
changes admit of some apology as an attempt to preserve what is
undoubtedly a Homeric characteristic, we must a