not Homer either, it is not even Cowper. As a child I first read Pope's Homer with a rapture which no subsequent work could ever afford, and children are not the worst judges of their own language. As a boy I read Homer in the original, as we have all done, some of us by force, and a few by favour; under which description I come is nothing to the purpose, it is enough that I read him. As a man I have tried to read Cowper's version, and I found it impossible. Has any human reader ever succeeded? [Footnote 1: I will submit to Mr. Bowles's own judgment a passage from another poem of Cowper's, to be compared with the same writer's Sylvan Sampler. In the lines to Mary,-- "Thy _needles_, once a shining store, For my sake restless heretofore, Now rust disused, and shine no more, My Mary," contain a simple, household, "_indoor_," artificial, and ordinary image; I refer Mr. Bowles to the stanza, and ask if these three lines about "_needles_" are not worth all the boasted twaddling about trees, so triumphantly re-quoted? and yet, in _fact_, what do they convey? A homely collection of images and ideas, associated with the darning of stockings, and the hemming of shirts, and the mending of breeches; but will any one deny that they are eminently poetical and pathetic as addressed by Cowper to his nurse? The trash of trees reminds me of a saying of Sheridan's. Soon after the "Rejected Address" scene in 1812, I met Sheridan. In the course of dinner, he said, "Lord Byron, did you know that, amongst the writers of addresses, was Whitbread himself?" I answered by an enquiry of what sort of an address he had made. "Of that," replied Sheridan, "I remember little, except that there was a _phoenix_ in it."--"A phoenix!! Well, how did he describe it?"--"_Like a poulterer_," answered Sheridan: "it was green, and yellow, and red, and blue: he did not let us off for a single feather." And just such as this poulterer's account of a phoenix is Cowper's stick-picker's detail of a wood, with all its petty minutiae of this, that, and the other.]