declares that the structure of my sentences is good and Homeric. For this I give the credit to my metre, which alone confers on me this cardinal advantage. But in turn I will compliment Mr Arnold at the expense of some other critics. He does know, and they do not, the difference of flowing and smooth. A mountain torrent is flowing, but often very rough; such is Homer. The 'staircases of Neptune' on the canal of Languedoc are smooth, but do not flow: you have to descend abruptly from each level to the next. It would be unjust to say absolutely, that such is Pope's smoothness; yet often, I feel, this censure would not be too severe. The rhyme forces him to so frequent a change of the nominative, that he becomes painfully discontinuous, where Homer is what Aristotle calls 'long-linked'. At the same time, in our language, in order to impart a flowing style, good structure does not suffice. A principle is needed, unknown to the Greeks; viz. the natural divisions of the sentence oratorically, must coincide with the divisions of the verse musically. To attain this always in a long poem, is very difficult to a translator who is scrupulous as to tampering with the sense. I have not always been successful in this. But before any critic passes on me the general sentence that I am 'deficient in flow', let him count up the proportion of instances in which he
