_Marmion_ and some passages in the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, are
about the most Homeric things in our language. Cowper brought such
poetic gifts to his work that his failure might have deterred others
from making the same hopeless attempt. But a failure his work is; the
translation is no more a counterpart of the original, than the Ouse
creeping through its meadows is the counterpart of the Aegean rolling
before a fresh wind and under a bright sun. Pope delights school-boys;
Cowper delights nobody, though on the rare occasions when he is taken
from the shelf, he commends himself, in a certain measure, to the taste
and judgment of cultivated men.

In his translations of Horace, both those from the Satires and those
from the Odes, Cowper succeeds far better. Horace requires in his
translator little of the fire which Cowper lacked. In the Odes he
requires grace, in the Satires urbanity and playfulness, all of which
Cowper had in abundance. Moreover, Horace is separated from us by no
intellectual gulf. He belongs to what Dr. Arnold called the modern
period of ancient history. Nor is Cowper's translation of part of the
eighth book of Virgil's Aeneid bad, in spite of the heaviness of the
blank verse. Virgil, like Horace, is within his intellectual range.

As though a translation of the whole of the Homeric poems had not been
enough to bury his finer faculty, and prevent him from giving us any
more of the minor poems, the publishers seduced him into undertaking an
edition of Milton, which was to eclipse all its predecessors in
splendour. Perhaps he may have been partly entrapped by a chivalrous
desire to rescue his idol from the disparagement cast on it by the
tasteless and illiberal Johnson. The project after weighing on his
mind and spirits for some time was abandoned, leaving as its traces
only translations of Milton's Latin poems, and a few notes on _Paradise
Lost,_ in which there is too much of religion, too little of art.

Lady Hesketh had her eye on the Laureateship, and probably with that
view persuaded her cousin to write loyal verses on the recovery of
George III. He wrote the verses, but to the hint of the Laureateship
he said, "Heaven guard my brows from the wreath you mention, whatever
wreaths beside may hereafter adorn them. It would be a leaden
extinguisher clapt on my genius, and I should never more produce a line
worth reading." Besides, was he not already the mortuary poet of All
Saints, No