otally unknown to the inhabitants of Greece. They had
no recourse to the barbarians for poetical beauties, but sought for
every thing in Homer, where, indeed, there is but little that they might
not find.

The Italians have been very diligent translators; but I can hear of no
version, unless, perhaps, Anguillara's Ovid may be excepted, which is
read with eagerness. The Iliad of Salvini every reader may discover to
be punctiliously exact; but it seems to be the work of a linguist
skilfully pedantick; and his countrymen, the proper judges of its power
to please, reject it with disgust.

Their predecessors, the Romans, have left some specimens of translation
behind them, and that employment must have had some credit in which
Tully and Germanicus engaged; but, unless we suppose, what is perhaps
true, that the plays of Terence were versions of Menander, nothing
translated seems ever to have risen to high reputation. The French, in
the meridian hour of their learning, were very laudably industrious to
enrich their own language with the wisdom of the ancients; but found
themselves reduced, by whatever necessity, to turn the Greek and Roman
poetry into prose. Whoever could read an author, could translate him.
From such rivals little can be feared.

The chief help of Pope in this arduous undertaking was drawn from the
versions of Dryden. Virgil had borrowed much of his imagery from Homer,
and part of the debt was now paid by his translator. Pope searched the
pages of Dryden for happy combinations of heroick diction; but it will
not be denied that he added much to what he found. He cultivated our
language with so much diligence and art, that he has left in his Homer a
treasure of poetical elegancies to posterity. His version may be said to
have tuned the English tongue; for, since its appearance, no writer,
however deficient in other powers, has wanted melody. Such a series of
lines, so elaborately corrected, and so sweetly modulated, took
possession of the publick ear; the vulgar was enamoured of the poem, and
the learned wondered at the translation.

But in the most general applause discordant voices will always be
heard. It has been objected, by some who wish to be numbered among the
sons of learning, that Pope's version of Homer is not Homerical; that it
exhibits no resemblance of the original and characteristick manner of
the father of poetry, as it wants his awful simplicity, his artless
grandeur, his unaffected majesty