plished early in his life, produced to its author considerably more than five thousand pounds. The years employed by each translator in the same arduous undertaking were nearly equal. But to form that equality, we must include the time devoted by Cowper to the great changes he made in new modelling his translation.

"I began the Iliad in my twenty-fifth year (said Pope to Mr. Spence) and it took up that and five more to finish it."

Pope had partners in the latter portion of his work: Cowper accomplished his mighty labour by his own exertions; and he seems to have taken an honest pleasure in recording with his own hand the time, and the pains, that he bestowed on his translation.

In the Copy of Clarke's Homer, which he valued particularly as the gift of his friend, Mr. Rose, he inserted the following memorandum.

"My translation of the Iliad I began on the twenty-first day of November, in the year 1784, and finished the translation of the Odyssey on the twenty-fifth day of August, 1790: during eight months of this time I was hindered by indisposition, so that I have been occupied in the work on the whole five years and one month. W. Cowper.

"Mem.I gave the work another revisal, while it was in the press, which I finished March 4, 1791."

When we add to this account all the time which he gave to preparation for a second edition, it will hardly be hyperbolical to say, that his deeply studied version of Homer was, like the siege of Troy, a work of ten years. Nor will this time appear wonderful, when we recollect how determined Cowper was to be as minutely faithful, as possible, to the exact sense of his original. The following passage from one of his letters to Mr. Park will show how much he gratified his own mind by such scrupulous fidelity. In thanking his friend for a present of Chapman's Iliad, he says

Weston, July 15, 1793.

I have consulted him in one passage of some difficulty, and find him giving a sense of his own, not at all warranted by the words of Homer. Pope sometimes does this; and sometimes omits the difficult part entirely. I can boast of having done neither, though it has cost me infinite pains to exempt myself from the necessity.

The late Mr. Wakefield, in republishing Pope's Homer, has mentioned Cowper's superior fidelity to his original with the liberal praise of a scholar; but he falls, I think, into injudicious severity on the structure of his verse-a severity the more remarkable, as he warmly censures Boswell for unfeeling petulance, and insolent dogmatism, in speaking of Cowper's translation. Mr. Wakefield, though a man of extensive learning, and acute sensibility, appears to me in some measure unjust both to Cowper and to Pope. He labours to prove, that Pope was miserably defective in the knowledge of Greek, and questions the exactitude of Lord Bathurst's testimony, in the anecdote that seemed to vindicate the translator's acquaintance with the original. It is in my power to strengthen the credibility of that anecdote by a circumstance within my own memory, which I mention with pleasure, to refute a strange uncandid supposition, that Pope did not read the Greek which he profest to translate; but trusted entirely to the other translators. Many years ago I had in my hands a small edition of Homer, (Greek, without Latin) and it was the very copy, that Pope used in his translation. It had a few memorandums in his own hand-writing, ascertaining the lines he translated on such and such days. I might have bought the book for a

price considerably above its usual value, but I was at that time unhappily infected with Warton's prejudice against the genius of Pope; and from the influence of that prejudice I failed to purchase a book, which, " on my mended judgment, if I offend not to say it is mended," I should have rejoiced to acquire by doubling the price. May this petty anecdote be a warning to every literary youth, of an ardent spirit, not to adopt, too hastily, ideas that may lessen his regard for such celebrated writers, as time and experience will probably endear to his more cultivated mind.

It is indeed a prejudice not uncommon in the literary world, that little respect is due to poetical translators. The learned and amiable Jortin says, in his Life of Erasmus, "the translating of poets into other languages, and into verse, seems to be an occupation beneath a good poet; a work in which there is much labour, and little honor."

Jortin was led to this idea by some expressions in a letter from Erasmus to Eobanus Hessus, who translated Homer into very animated Latin verse. As that translator did not employ a living language in his version of the great poet, his correspondent might justly apprehend, that the credit of his work would not be answerable to his labour; but surely the case is

very different, when poets, who have gained reputation by original works in a modern language, devote their talents to make their countrymen (learned or unlearned) easily and agreeably intimate with the poetical favorites of the ancient world.

Jortin presumes, that pecuniary advantage must be a primary motive with a translator of extensive works, but there is a nobler incentive to such composition, and one that I am persuaded was very forcibly felt both by Pope and Cowper I mean the generous gratification, that a feeling spirit enjoys in a fair prospect of adding new lustre to the glory of a favorite author, to whom he has been often indebted for inexhaustible delight. He labours indeed, but he frequently labours

"Studio fallente laborem."

Yet the magnitude of such works entitles them to no ordinary praise, when they are accomplished with considerable success. Every nation ought to think itself highly indebted to translators, who enrich their native language by works of such merit as the Homers of Pope and Cowper, because a long translation, to the greatest masters of poetical diction, is a sort of fatiguing dance performed in fetters. It certainly was so to Pope, and even to Cowper,