ildest departures from the
guide whom he professes to follow."[454] The popular idea that the
translator should try to imagine to himself the style which his author
would have used had he been writing in English is to Cowper "a direction
which wants nothing but practicability to recommend it. For suppose six
persons, equally qualified for the task, employed to translate the same
Ancient into their own language, with this rule to guide them. In the
event it would be found that each had fallen on a manner different from
that of all the rest, and by probable inference it would follow that
none had fallen on the right."[455]

Cowper's advocacy of Miltonic blank verse as a suitable vehicle for a
translation of Homer need not concern us here, but another innovation on
which he lays considerable stress in his prefaces helps to throw light
on the practice and the standards of his immediate predecessors. With
more veracity than Pope, he represents himself as having followed his
author even in his "plainer" passages. "The passages which will be least
noticed, and possibly not at all, except by those who shall wish to find
me at a fault," he writes in the preface to the first edition, "are
those which have cost me abundantly the most labor. It is difficult to
kill a sheep with dignity in a modern language, to slay and prepare it
for the table, detailing every circumstance in the process. Difficult
also, without sinking below the level of poetry, to harness mules to a
wagon, particularizing every article of their furniture, straps, rings,
staples, and even the tying of the knots that kept all together. Homer,
who writes always to the eye with all his sublimity and grandeur, has
the minuteness of a Flemish painter." In the preface to his second
edition he recurs to this problem and makes a significant comment on
Pope's method of solving it. "There is no end of passages in Homer," he
repeats, "which must creep unless they be lifted; yet in all such, all
embellishment is out of the question. The hero puts on his clothes, or
refreshes himself with food and wine, or he yokes his steeds, takes a
journey, and in the evening preparation is made for his repose. To give
relief to subjects prosaic as these without seeming unseasonably tumid
is extremely difficult. Mr. Pope abridges some of them, and others he
omits; but neither of these liberties was compatible with the nature of
my undertaking."[456]

That Cowper's reaction against Pope's i