There is no ground for supposing that any one of the scores of translations and imitations of the _Ars Poetica_ had ever met Byron’s eye[131]; the nearest prototypes in English poetry of _Hints from Horace_ are probably Pope’s _Essay on Criticism_ and _Epistle to Augustus_. Certain superficial resemblances have led critics to the inference that Pope’s _Essay_ is accountable for much of Byron’s _Hints_. It is remarkable that the two authors, born just a century apart, should have attempted satires so similar in tone at ages approximately the same. Pope’s _Essay on Criticism_, composed probably in 1709, was printed in 1711, a hundred years before Byron wrote _Hints from Horace_. In this work Pope tried to do for criticism what Horace had done for poetry: that is, to codify and express in compact form some generally accepted principles of the art. Pope, however, saw fit to introduce incidentally some conventional precepts concerning the subject-matter of literary criticism, borrowing them from Horace, and Horace’s French imitator, Boileau. Thus in Pope’s _Essay_ are to be found many of the maxims which Byron transferred into _Hints from Horace_ from the Latin source. The correspondence between such passages in the _Essay_ and their counterparts in _Hints from Horace_ has led Weiser to conclude, from a study of parallel ideas, that Byron’s poem is based, to a large extent, on Pope’s work.[132] His thesis, however, has been all but conclusively refuted by Levy, who shows that in the nine instances of parallelism adduced by Weiser as evidence, the lines quoted from _Hints from Horace_ are really much closer to lines from the _Ars Poetica_ than they are to the citations from the _Essay on Criticism_.[133] Undoubtedly there are couplets in the _Hints_ that recall the _Essay_; but in view of Byron’s specific statement of his obligation to Horace, it would be rash to assume that Pope’s influence was more than a general one, the natural result of Byron’s careful study of his style and manner. Pope’s _Epistle to Augustus_, a paraphrase of Horace’s Book II, Epistle 1, is, in several respects, not unlike _Hints from Horace_. It pursues the same method in substituting English names for Greek and Roman ones, and in replacing classical references by allusions to contemporary life. Moreover the _Epistle_, with its judgment on English writers, its criticism of the drama, and its estimate of the age, is structurally more akin to _Hints from Horace_ than is ordinarily supposed. It would be superfluous to attempt to add anything to Professor Cook’s work in outlining the instances in which Byron merely translated Horace. A single illustration will suffice to show how the same Latin lines were treated by Pope, and, later, by Byron. Horace’s counsel:-- “Vos exemplaria Græca Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna”[134] is paraphrased roughly in the _Essay on Criticism_ as,