Who could have conjectured that even Pope would wander away so far from his matchless original? "Wretches!" cries Theoclymenus, the seer; and that becomes, "O race to death devote!" "Your heads are swathed in night," turns into "With Stygian shade each destined peer" (peer is good!) "impending fates invade," where Homer says nothing about Styx nor peers. The Latin Orcus takes the place of Erebus, and "the burning coasts" are derived from modern popular theology. The very grammar detains or defies the reader; is it the sun that does not give his golden orb to roll, or who, or what? The only place where the latter-day Broome or Fenton can flatter himself that he rivals Pope at his own game is-- "What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!" This is, if possible, _more_ classical than Pope's own-- "With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned." But Pope nobly revindicates his unparalleled power of translating funnily, when, in place of "the walls drip with blood," he writes-- "With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round." Homer does not appear to have been acquainted with rubies; but what of that? And how noble, how eminently worthy of Pope it is to add that the ghosts "howl"! I tried to make them gibber, but ghosts _do_ gibber in Homer (though not in this passage), so Pope, Fenton, Broome, and Co., make them howl. No, Pope is not lightly to be rivalled by a modern translator. The following example, a far-off following of a noted contemporary poet, may be left unsigned-- "Wretches, the bane hath befallen, the night and the blight of your sin Sweeps like a shroud o'er the faces and limbs that were gladsome therein; And the dirge of the dead breaketh forth, and the faces of all men are wet, And the walls are besprinkled with blood, and the ghosts in the gateway are met, Ghosts in the court and the gateway are gathered, Hell opens her lips, And the sun in his splendour is shrouded, and sickens in spasm of eclipse." The next is longer and slower: the poet has a difficulty in telling his story: "Wretches," he cried, "what doom is this? what night Clings like a face-cloth to the face of each,-- Sweeps like a shroud o'er knees and head? for lo! The windy wail of death is up, and tears On every cheek are wet; each shining wall And beauteous interspace of beam and beam Weeps tears of blood, and shadows in the door Flicker, and fill the portals and the court-- Shadows of men that hellwards yearn--and now The sun himself hath perished out of heaven, And all the land is darkened with a mist."