Pope knew next to no Greek, but then he did not work upon the Greek text. He had Chapman's translation ever at his elbow, also the version of John Ogilby, which had appeared in 1660--a splendid folio, with illustrations by the celebrated Hollar. Dryden had not got farther than the first book of the _Iliad_, and a fragment of the sixth book. A faithful rendering of the exact sense of Homer is not, of course, to be looked for. In the first book Pope describes the captive maid Briseis as looking back. In Homer she does not look back, but in Dryden she does; and Pope followed Dryden, and did not look, at all events, any farther back. But what really is odd is that in Cowper's translation Briseis looks back too. Now, Cowper had been to a public school, and consequently knew Greek, and made it his special boast that, though dull, he was faithful. It is easy to make fun of Pope's version, but true scholars have seldom done so. Listen to Professor Conington {76}:-- 'It has been, and I hope still is, the delight of every intelligent schoolboy. They read of kings, and heroes, and mighty deeds in language which, in its calm majestic flow, unhasting, unresting, carries them on as irresistibly as Homer's own could do were they born readers of Greek, and their minds are filled with a conception of the heroic age, not indeed strictly true, but almost as near the truth as that which was entertained by Virgil himself.' Mr. D. G. Rossetti, himself both an admirable translator and a distinguished poet, has in effect laid down the first law of rhythmical translation thus: 'Thou shalt not turn a good poem into a bad one.' Pope kept this law. Pope was a great adept at working upon other men's stuff. There is hardly anything in which men differ more enormously than in the degree in which they possess this faculty of utilization. Pope's _Essay on Criticism_, which brought him great fame, and was thought a miracle of wit, was the result of much hasty reading, undertaken with the intention of appropriation. Apart from the _limae labor_, which was enormous, and was never grudged by Pope, there was not an hour's really hard work in it. Dryden had begun the work of English criticism with his _Essay on Dramatic Poesy_, and other well-known pieces. He had also translated Boileau's _Art of Poetry_. Then there were the works of those noble lords, Lord Sheffield, Lord Roscommon, Lord Granville, and the Duke of Buckingham. Pope, who loved a brief, read all these books greedily, and with an amazing quick eye for points. His orderly brain and brilliant wit re-arranged and rendered resplendent the ill-placed and ill-set thoughts of other men. The same thing is noticeable in the most laboured production of his later life, the celebrated _Essay on Man_. For this he was coached by Lord Bolingbroke.