est's income was not large; and his friends endeavoured, but
without success, to obtain an augmentation. It is reported, that the
education of the young prince was offered to him, but that he required a
more extensive power of superintendence than it was thought proper to
allow him.

In time, however, his revenue was improved; he lived to have one of the
lucrative clerkships of the privy council, 1752: and Mr. Pitt at last
had it in his power to make him treasurer of Chelsea hospital.

He was now sufficiently rich; but wealth came too late to be long
enjoyed; nor could it secure him from the calamities of life: he lost,
1755, his only son; and the year after, March 26, a stroke of the palsy
brought to the grave one of the few poets to whom the grave might be
without its terrours.

Of his translations, I have only compared the first Olympick Ode with
the original, and found my expectation surpassed, both by its elegance
and its exactness. He does not confine himself to his author's train of
stanzas: for he saw that the difference of the languages required a
different mode of versification. The first strophe is eminently happy:
in the second he has a little strayed from Pindar's meaning, who says,
"if thou, my soul, wishest to speak of games, look not in the desert sky
for a planet hotter than the sun; nor shall we tell of nobler games than
those of Olympia." He is sometimes too paraphrastical. Pindar bestows
upon Hiero an epithet, which, in one word, signifies "delighting in
horses;" a word which, in the translation, generates these lines:

Hiero's royal brows, whose care
Tends the courser's noble breed,
Pleas'd to nurse the pregnant mare,
Pleas'd to train the youthful steed.

Pindar says of Pelops, that "he came alone in the dark to the White
Sea;" and West,

Near the billow-beaten side
Of the foam-besilver'd main,
Darkling, and alone, he stood:

which, however, is less exuberant than the former passage.

A work of this kind must, in a minute examination, discover many
imperfections; but West's version, so far as I have considered it,
appears to be the product of great labour and great abilities.

His Institution of the Garter, 1742, is written with sufficient
knowledge of the manners that prevailed in the age to which it is
referred, and with great elegance of diction; but, for want of a process
of events, neither knowledge nor elegance preserve the reader from
weariness.