It is to be admitted that Pope’s translation is to some extent open to the charge brought against it of corrupting the language with a meretricious standard of poetic diction. In his Preface he expresses his misgivings as to the language fit and proper for an English rendering of Homer, and indeed it is usually recognized that his diction was, to a certain extent, imposed upon him both by the nature of his original, as well as by the lack of elasticity in his closed couplet. To the latter cause was doubtless due, not only the use of stock epithets to fill out the line, but also the inevitable repetition of certain words, due to the requirements of rhyme, even at the expense of straining or distorting their ordinary meaning. Thus _train_, for instance, on account of its convenience as a rhyming word, is often used to signify “a host,” or “body,” and similarly _plain_, _main_, for the ocean. In this connexion it has also been aptly pointed out that some of the defects resulted from the fact that Pope had founded his own epic style on that of the Latin poets, whose manner is most opposed to Homer’s. Thus he often sought to deck out or expand simple thoughts or commonplace situations by using what he no doubt considered really “poetical language,” and thus, for instance, where Homer simply says, “And the people perished,” Pope has to say, “And heaped the camp with mountains of the dead.” The repeated use of periphrases: _feathered fates_, for “arrows”; _fleecy breed_ for “sheep”; _the wandering nation of a summer’s day_ for “insects”; _the beauteous kind_ for “women”; _the shining mischief_ for “a fascinating woman”; _rural care_ for “the occupations of the shepherd”; _the social shades_ for “the ghosts of two brothers,” may be traced to the same influence.[66] But apart from these defects the criticisms of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and their ascribing of the “poetical diction,” which they wished to abolish, to the influence of Pope’s “Homer,” are to a large extent unjust. Many of the characteristics of this “spurious poetic language” were well established long before Pope produced his translation. It is probable that they are present to a much larger extent, for instance, in Dryden; _painted_, _rural_, _finny_, _briny_, _shady_, _vocal_, _mossy_, _fleecy_, come everywhere in his translations, and not only there. Some of his adjectives in y are more audacious than those of Pope: _spongy clouds_, _chinky hives_, _snary webs_, _roomy sea_, etc. Most of the periphrases used by Pope and many more are already to be found in Dryden: “summer” is _the sylvan reign_; “bees,” _the frugal_ or _industrious kind_; “arrows,” _the feathered wood_ or _feathered fates_; “sheep,” _the woolly breed_; “frogs,” _the loquacious race_! From all Pope’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries similar examples may be quoted, like Gay’s When floating clouds their spongy fleeces drain (“Rural Sports”)