was tired of translating, and he arranged for assistance. He took into
alliance a couple of Cambridge men, who were small poets capable of
fairly adopting his versification. One of them was William Broome, a
clergyman who held several livings and married a rich widow.
Unfortunately his independence did not restrain him from writing poetry,
for which want of means would have been the only sufficient excuse. He
was a man of some classical attainments, and had helped Pope in
compiling notes to the Iliad from Eustathius, an author whom Pope would
have been scarcely able to read without such assistance. Elijah Fenton,
his other assistant, was a Cambridge man who had sacrificed his claims
of preferment by becoming a non-juror, and picked up a living partly by
writing and chiefly by acting as tutor to Lord Orrery, and afterwards in
the family of Trumball's widow. Pope, who introduced him to Lady
Trumball, had also introduced him to Craggs, who, when Secretary of
State, felt his want of a decent education, and wished to be polished by
some competent person. He seems to have been a kindly, idle, honourable
man, who died, says Pope, of indolence, and more immediately, it
appears, of the gout. The alliance thus formed was rather a delicate
one, and was embittered by some of Pope's usual trickery. In issuing his
proposals he spoke in ambiguous terms of two friends who were to render
him some undefined assistance, and did not claim to be the translator,
but to have undertaken the translation. The assistants, in fact, did
half the work, Broome translating eight, and Fenton four, out of the
twenty-four books. Pope was unwilling to acknowledge the full amount of
their contributions; he persuaded Broome--a weak, good-natured man--to
set his hand to a postscript to the Odyssey, in which only three books
are given to Broome himself, and only two to Fenton. When Pope was
attacked for passing off other people's verses as his own, he boldly
appealed to this statement to prove that he had only received Broome's
help in three books, and at the same time stated the whole amount which
he had paid for the eight, as though it had been paid for the three.
When Broome, in spite of his subservience, became a little restive under
this treatment, Pope indirectly admitted the truth by claiming only
twelve books in an advertisement to his works, and in a note to the
_Dunciad_, but did not explicitly retract the other statement. Broome
could not effective