Yet it may be alleged, that his temper was too little calculated to inspire a tender affection in his friends, to render the manner in which his death would be received, an example for all similar cases. Still it is, perhaps, generally true, that in the calamities of others,

Indifference clad in wisdom's guise
All fortitude of mind supplies;

and that the ordinary language of lamentation at the decease of one not intimately connected with us, and whose life was not greatly important to our happiness, is little more than, as he has represented it, the customary cant of feeling. We must likewise assent to the remark on the force that selfishness gives to sympathy, which he has so finely expressed in the following lines:

Yet should some neighbour feel a pain
Just in the parts where I complain,
How many a message he would send!

What hearty prayers that I should mend !

Inquire what regimen I kept,
What gave me ease, and how I slept ;
And more lament when I was dead

Than all the snivellers round my bed.

The lamentations of his female friends over their cards will amuse you, as one of his happiest conversation-pieces. The greater part of the poem is devoted to the justification of his character and conduct; and, unless you have acquainted yourself with his life, will not greatly interest you. Indeed, I recollect reading it with greater pleasure in the earlier editions, when there was less detail of this kind.

So much may suffice for an author who, upon the whole, is regarded rather as a man of wit than as a poet. Though inimitable in one style of writing, his excellence. is limited to that style. His works are extremely amusing, but the pleasure we take in them is abated by a vein of malignity which is too apparent even when he is most sportive.

Farewell!

LETTER VII.

MY DEAR MARY,

You doubtless bear in mind, perhaps with some little chagrin, that I tore you, as it were, from the perusal of one of our most charming poets, precisely at the time when it was becoming peculiarly interesting to you. I then gave you the reason for such an exercise of discipline; and I am persuaded you now feel the benefit of having been introduced to various modes of poetic excellence, before your taste was too firmly fixed upon one.

I should probably take you a still wider excursion before returning to the volumes of POPE, did I not wish to engage you in the study (do not be alarmed at the word!) of one of his great performances, for the purpose of enlarging your acquaintance with poetic history; that is, with the per

I

sonages, human and divine, and the incidents, which are so frequently alluded to in modern as well as in ancient poetry. refer to his translation of Homer's "Iliad," a work of remote antiquity, which stands at the head of epic poetry, and has a greater share of fame accumulated around it than perhaps any other literary composition. The Trojan war, its heroes and its gods, are a common fund upon which all poets draw at pleasure. They furnish an inexhaustible store for simile, allusion, parody, and other poetical uses; and every writer takes it for granted that all the circumstances belonging to them are perfectly familiar to his reader. Moreover, the whole frame of the epic, as a species of composition, is modelled upon the Iliad of Homer, and its companion the Odyssey; whence the perusal of one or both of these pieces ought to precede that of all later productions of the same class.

Pope's translations of Homer have always been esteemed as first-rate perform

ances of the kind; and indeed, no poetical versions surpass them in beauty of versification and elegance and splendour of diction. They are faithful, too, as far as to the substance of the originals; they neither omit nor add circumstances of narrative or similes, and they adhere to the general sense of the Greek in speeches and sentiments. But with respect to the dress and colouring, it must be confessed that Pope and Homer differ in all the points that discriminate the writers of an age of refinement from those of an age of simplicity. The ancient bard, though lofty in his diction where the subject is elevated, relates common things in plain language, is sometimes coarse and frequently dry, and has many passages which exhibit nothing of the poet but a sonorous versification. The translator, on the other hand, never forgets that he is to support the dignity of modern heroics: and though he has too much judgment to scatter ornament with a lavish hand; yet, to soften what is harsh,