tastes, our author writ his Eloise, in opposition to it; but forgot innocence and virtue: If you take away her tender thoughts, and her fierce defires, all the rest is of no value." In which, methinks, his judgment resembleth that of a French taylor on a Villa and gardens by the Thames: "All this is very fine, but take away the river, and it is good for nothing."
But very contrary hereunto was the opinion of
himself, saying in his Alma[1],
O Abelard! ill fated youth,
Thy tale will justify this truth.
But well I weet thy cruel wrong
Adorns a nobler Poet's song:
Dan Pope, for thy misfortune griev'd,
With kind concern and skill has weav'd
A silken web; and ne'er shall fade
Its colours: gently has he laid
The mantle o'er thy sad distress,
And Venus shall the texture bless, &c.
Come we now to his translation of the Iliad, celebrated by numerous pens, yet shall it suffice to mention the indefatigable
Who (tho' otherwise a severe censurer of our author) yet styleth this a "laudable translation[2]." That ready writer,
in his forementioned Essay, frequently commends the same. And the painful
thus extols it[3], "The spirit of Homer breathes all through this translation.—I am in doubt, whether I should most admire the justness to the original, or the force and beauty of the language, or the sounding variety of the numbers: But when I find all these meet, it puts me in mind of what the poet says of one of his heroes, That he alone rais'd and flung with ease a weighty stone, that two common men could not lift from the ground; just so, one single person has performed in this translation, what I once despaired to have seen done by the force of several masterly hands. Indeed the same gentleman appears to have chang'd his sentiment in his Essay
