olumes. For each volume Lintot was
to pay 200_l._; and, besides this, he was to supply Pope gratuitously
with the copies for his subscribers. The subscribers paid a guinea a
volume, and as 575 subscribers took 654 copies, Pope received altogether
5320_l._ 4_s._ at the regular price, whilst some royal and distinguished
subscribers paid larger sums. By the publication of the Odyssey Pope
seems to have made about 3500_l._ more,[6] after paying his assistants.
The result was, therefore, a total profit at least approaching 9000_l._
The last volume of the Odyssey did not appear till 1726, and the
payments were thus spread over eleven years. Pope, however, saved enough
to be more than comfortable. In the South Sea excitement he ventured to
speculate, but though for a time he fancied himself to have made a large
sum, he seems to have retired rather a loser than a gainer. But he could
say with perfect truth that, "thanks to Homer," he "could live and
thrive, indebted to no prince or peer alive." The money success is,
however, of less interest to us than the literary. Pope put his best
work into the translation of the Iliad. His responsibility, he said,
weighed upon him terribly on starting. He used to dream of being on a
long journey, uncertain which way to go, and doubting whether he would
ever get to the end. Gradually he fell into the habit of translating
thirty or forty verses before getting up, and then "piddling with it"
for the rest of the morning; and the regular performance of his task
made it tolerable. He used, he said at another time, to take advantage
of the "first heat," then correct by the original and other
translations; and finally to "give it a reading for the versification
only." The statement must be partly modified by the suggestion that the
translations were probably consulted before the original. Pope's
ignorance of Greek--an awkward qualification for a translator of
Homer--is undeniable. Gilbert Wakefield, who was, I believe, a fair
scholar and certainly a great admirer of Pope, declares his conviction
to be, after a more careful examination of the Homer than any one is now
likely to give, that Pope "collected the general purport of every
passage from some of his predecessors--Dryden" (who only translated the
first Iliad), "Dacier, Chapman, or Ogilby." He thinks that Pope would
have been puzzled to catch at once the meaning even of the Latin
translation, and points out proofs of his ignorance of both langua