And I will give thee what shall please thy heart.
We Cyclopses have vines that yield good wine,
Which from the earth by rain from heaven start;
But this same branch of nectar is divine.'
When he had said, I gave him wine again;
Three times I filled the can, and he as oft
Drank 't off. But when it came up to his brain,
Then spake I to him gentle words and soft:
'Cyclops, since you my name desire to know,
I'll tell it you, and on your word rely.
My name is Noman, all men call me so,
My father, mother, and my company.'
To which he soon and sadly made reply,

'Noman, I'll eat you last, none shall outlive you
Of all that are here of your company;

And that's the gift I promised to give you.'"

It cannot be denied that here is considerable vigor of expression, but it is accompanied by a rough and unpoetical diction; while, if we compare the passage with Homer's narrative, we find it characterized by baldness-epithets the most apt being not infrequently eliminated to reduce the matter to a bulk equal to the original-in short, all the marks of an unimaginative nature to which the higher realm of the muses was an uncongenial abode.

The same remarks apply to the crafty Ithacan's account of the ineffectual call of the blinded giant upon his brother Cyclopes for assistance, (OdysseyR ix, 420-436,) as reproduced by Hobbes :

Came in, some one and some another way;

And from without the den asked what he'd have.

'What ails thee, Polyphemus, so to cry

In dead of night, and make us break our sleep?
Goes any one about to make thee die,

By force or fraud, or steal away thy sheep?'

Then Polyphemus answered from his cave,
"Friends, Noman kills me!' 'Why, then,' said they,
'We have no power from sickness you to save;

You must unto your father Neptune pray.'

This said, they parted each one to his own

Dark cavern; then within myself I laughed
To think how with my name the mighty clown

I so deceived had, and gulled by craft."

The most famous translation ever yet made in the English tongue, to which we have already had frequent occasion to refer, is certainly that written by Alexander Pope. Few productions of genius have exercised a more lasting influence, whether for better or for worse, upon public taste, or more divided the suffrages of the literary. Dr. Samuel Johnson declared that Pope's Iliad "is certainly the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen, and its publication must therefore be considered as one of the great events in the annals of learning." But over against this almost extravagant laudation we must set the no less remarkable disparagement of Pope by the celebrated Joseph Addison, who was wont to rate above it the translation of the first book of the Iliad, published about the same time by Thomas Tickell, a poet now well-nigh forgotten, and to declare that the latter was the best version ever written. That neither of these opinions is just, will probably be the conclusion of almost every impartial reader. It is too late to attempt to reverse the judgment of the world in the matter of Alexander Pope's original compositions. Whatever may be our estimate of his imaginative powers-whether or not we view his imagery as rather a laborious compilation from various sources than the legitimate offspring of his own mind— it is undeniable that few writers have equaled him in felicity and appropriateness of expression. But the very qualities which give zest to his own poems debarred his becoming a successful translator of Homer. The studied antithesis, the piquant epigram, the "tour de force" which surprise and startle the spectator-these must find their way even into the majestic epic whose very idea implies calm and repose. And this for a very good reason. The habit of calculating the effect of every thing he said and did was either a part of Pope's nature, or had been so long practiced as to become a second nature to him. His study was, indeed, to appear natural; but real nature was as abhorrent to his ideas of refinement, and as commonplace, as the duties of the farm-house and the dairy would have been to the exquisites and fine ladies who indulged in raptures over the Arcadia which Queen Marie Antoinette had created for herself in the seclusion of the Petit Trianon. This was so patent that it could not be overlooked even by a biographer so partial as Dr. Johnson. "In all his intercourse

with mankind he had great delight in artifice, and endeavored to attain all his purposes by indirect and unsuspected methods. 'He hardly drank tea without a stratagem.' If, at the house of friends, he wanted any accommodation, he was not willing to ask for it in plain terms, but would mention it remotely as something convenient; though, when it was procured, he soon made it appear for whose sake it had been recommended. He practiced his arts on such small occasions that Lady Bolingbroke used to say, in a French phrase, that he played the politician about cabbages and turnips.'

In fact, there was so much that was petty and mean about Pope that we can scarcely be surprised at his failure to rise to the sublime simplicity of Homer. He thought less of his literary distinction than of the little fortune, as he termed it, which he had laid up. "It would be hard," remarks Dr. Johnson, "to find a man, so well entitled to notice by his wit, that ever delighted so much in talking of his money. In his letters and in his poems, his garden and his grotto, his quincunx and his vines, or some hints of his opulence, are always to be found. The great topic of his ridicule is poverty; the crimes with which he reproaches his antagonists are their debts, their habitation in the Mint, and their want of a dinner. He seems to be of an opinion, not very uncommon in the world, that to want money is to want every thing."

It is, however, the capital error into which Pope fell respecting the true function of a translator that chiefly vitiates his work. To give a passably correct paraphrase of his author's sense was all that he aimed at, or that the public demanded of him. The fault was after all, therefore, no less that of the age than his own. Being granted so much latitude, it is not wonderful that the translator took advantage of it. He was not a profound scholar in any department, least of all in the literature of Greece; and even the simple idiom which Homer employs presented to him frequent difficulties. There were, however, many helps-previous translations in verse and in prose, and commentaries—which he consulted through the medium of friends more familiar with the languages in which they were written than he was. He could have recourse to such friends for advice on points of special difficulty, and when fatigued with composition, he could even salary their pens. It is well known that

in the translation of the Odyssey this was particularly the case. After the great pecuniary success of his "Iliad," there was a large reward sure to follow the completion of his second work, to attain which with greater expedition and with less toil he called in the assistance of Fenton and Broome. Only twelve books were written by Pope; the remainder, or one half of the entire work, was the production of his coadjutors, with such assistance, in the way of correction, as he was pleased to accord them.

By the means he had within reach, having gained a general conception of the Greek poet's meaning, the translator seems to have set himself at work, little caring to preserve any exact correspondence between his version and the original. The main point was to attain a flowing verse and a perfect rhyme. To secure these, much must be omitted, more modified, and not a little arbitrarily introduced. Not that Pope can be accused of such extensive interpolations as those which he censures in Chapman, for they rarely exceed the limits of a line, or amount to more than the unwarranted insertion of an epithet. But, on the other hand, they are destitute of the justification, or, at least, palliation of which those of Chapman are susceptible. They introduce not what is congenial to Homer, but what is alien to his spirit. They are no "companion pieces to those which Homer had already painted," as Mr. Taylor very felicitously styles many of Chapman's unauthorized additions. They are rather foreign coloring superimposed, and that with too little discrimination, so that it disturbs the harmony of the parts, distracts the attention, and weakens the effect. Or, to change the figure, Homer is, for the most part, a clear, pellucid stream, which flows on so steadily and noiselessly as to attract little notice, while revealing with distinctness every rock and pebble in its bed. Pope would not be himself unless he were perpetually making an exertion to attract admiration. We are continually forgetting what he says in our enforced watchfulness to see in how sprightly a manner he says it.

A good instance, as well of the excellences as of the inaccuracies of Pope as a translator, is afforded by that passage in the fifth book of the Iliad in which the Greek poet likens the dust rising from the charge of the Greeks upon the Trojans to the chaff whitening the floor when men winnow the ripened grain :

Ως δ' ἄνεμος ἄχνας φορέει ἱερὰς κατ' ἀλωάς,
Ανδρῶν λικμώντων, ὅτε τε ξανθη Δημήτηρ

Κρίνῃ, ἐπειγομένων ἀνέμων, καρπόν τε καὶ ἄχνας, etc.

The passage is thus rendered by Pope:

"They turn, they stand, the Greeks their fury dare,
Condense their powers, and wait the growing war.
As when, on Ceres' sacred floor, the swain
Spreads the wide fan to clear the golden grain,
And the light chaff, before the breezes borne,

Ascends in clouds from off the heapy corn," etc.

See what a different picture we have here drawn for us from that which the original presents. Whereas Homer makes Ceres the agent, because the whole process of separating the wheat from the chaff was performed upon the floor consecrated to that goddess and under her protection, with Pope it is "the swain" who is brought out prominently to view. But, not content with destroying this highly poetical conception, he also describes the operation in a way that shows that he has forgotten, if he ever knew, the peculiar agriculture practiced among the Greeks from Homer's time down to the present. There was no "spreading the wide fan to clear the golden grain" at all about it. The implement used was nothing that could be spread, nor was it a fan, properly speaking. It was a broad shovel with which the farmer threw up the grain against the fresh wind, and the wind blew away the light and chaffy particles with which the grain was mingled. On the large paved threshing floors at the foot of the remaining columns of the temple of Jupiter Olympius, just outside of the city of Athens, we have often seen the Greek peasants repeating the winnowing in the identical manner in which they performed it in the ninth century before Christ.

Homer has, indeed, so graphically described the self-same operation in another place, that it would seem impossible for a careful reader to mistake his meaning. Describing (Book XIII, 518, etc.) the manner in which the arrow of Helenus glanced off from the armor of Menelaus, the poet likens it to the impulse with which beans or pulse fly from the broad shovel of the winnower:

Ὡς δ' ὅτ' ἀπὸ πλατέος πτυόφιν μεγάλην κατ' ἀλωὴν
Θρώσκουσιν κύαμοι μελανόχροες, ἢ ἐμέβινθοι,
Πνοιῇ ὑπὸ λιγυρῇ καὶ λικμητῆρος ἐρωῇ.