Mr. Thackeray so puts it in his worldfamous Lectures, and few literary anecdotes are wider known; but the better opinion undoubtedly is that the letter was Pope's from the beginning, and attributed by him to Gay because he did not want to have it appear that on the date in question he was corresponding with Lady Mary. After all, there is a great deal to be said in favour of honesty.

When we turn from the man to the poet we have at once to change our key. A cleverer fellow than Pope never commenced author. He was in his own mundane way as determined to be a poet, and the best going, as John Milton himself. He took pains to be splendid - he polished and pruned. His first draft never reached the printer though he sometimes said it did. This ought, I think, to endear him to us in these hasty days, when authors high and low think nothing of emptying the slops of their minds over their readers, without so much as a cry of 'Heads below.'

Pope's translation of the Iliad was his first great undertaking, and he worked at it like a Trojan. It was published by sub

scription for two guineas; that is, the first part was. His friends were set to work to collect subscribers. Caryll alone got thirtyeight. Pope fully entered into this. He was always alive to the value of his wares, and despised the foppery of those of his literary friends who would not make money out of their books, but would do so out of their country. He writes to Caryll :

'But I am in good earnest of late, too much a man of business to mind metaphors and similes. I find subscribing much superior to writing, and there is a sort of little epigram I more especially delight in, after the manner of rondeaus, which begin and end all in the same words, namely "Received" and "A. Pope." These epigrams end smartly, and each of them are tagged with two guineas. Of these, as I have learnt, you have composed several ready for me to set my name to.'

This is certainly much better than that trumpery walk in the moonshine. Pope had not at this time joined the Tories, and both parties subscribed. He cleared over £5,000 by the Iliad. Over the Odyssey he slackened, and employed two inferior wits

to do half the books; but even after paying his journeymen he made nearly £4,000 over the Odyssey. Well might he write in later life

'Since, thanks to Homer, I do live and thrive.'

Pope was amongst the first of prosperous authors, and heads the clan of cunning fellows who have turned their lyrical cry into consols, and their odes into acres.

Of the merits of this great work it is not necessary to speak at length. Mr. Edmund Yates tells a pleasant story of how one day when an old school Homer lay on his table, Shirley Brooks sauntered in, and taking the book up laid it down again, dryly observing, 'Ah! I see you have Homer's Iliad! Well, I believe, it is the best.' And so it is. Homer's Iliad is the best, and Pope's Homer's Iliad is the second best. Whose is the third best is controversy.

Pope knew next to no Greek, but then he did not work upon the Greek text. He had Chapman's translation ever at his elbow, also the version of John Ogilby, which had appeared in 1660-a splendid folio,

with illustrations by the celebrated Hollar. Dryden had not got farther than the first book of the Iliad, and a fragment of the sixth book. A faithful rendering of the exact sense of Homer is not, of course, to be looked for. In the first book Pope describes the captive maid Briseis as looking back. In Homer she does not look back, but in Dryden she does; and Pope followed Dryden, and did not look, at all events, any farther back.

But what really is odd is that in Cowper's translation Briseis looks back too. Now, Cowper had been to a public school, and consequently knew Greek, and made it his special boast that, though dull, he was faithful. It is easy to make fun of Pope's version, but true scholars have seldom done so. Listen to Professor Coning

'It has been, and I hope still is, the delight of every intelligent schoolboy. They read of kings, and heroes, and mighty deeds in language which, in its calm majestic flow, unhasting, unresting, carries them on as irresistibly as Homer's own could do

* In Oxford Essays for 1858.

were they born readers of Greek, and their minds are filled with a conception of the heroic age, not indeed strictly true, but almost as near the truth as that which was entertained by Virgil himself.'

Mr. D. G. Rossetti, himself both an admirable translator and a distinguished poet, has in effect laid down the first law of rhythmical translation thus: 'Thou shalt not turn a good poem into a bad one.' Pope kept this law.

Pope was a great adept at working upon other men's stuff. There is hardly anything in which men differ more enormously than in the degree in which they possess this faculty of utilisation. Pope's Essay on Criticism, which brought him great fame, and was thought a miracle of wit, was the result of much hasty reading, undertaken with the intention of appropriation. Apart from the lima labor, which was enormous, and was never grudged by Pope, there was not an hour's really hard work in it. Dryden had begun the work of English criticism with his Essay on Dramatic Poesy, and other well-known pieces. He had also translated Boileau's Art of Poetry. Then