According to the information which Pope gave to Spence, he commenced an epic poem at thirteen, and wrote four books of about a thousand verses each.[2] As his taste and judgment improved, he discovered the crudeness of his early flights, and for a while he almost relinquished his attempts at original composition, "My first taking to imitating," he said, "was not out of vanity, but humility. I saw how defective my own things were; and I endeavoured to mend my manner by copying good strokes from others."[3] "In my rambles through the poets," he said again, "when I met with a passage or story that pleased me more than ordinary, I used to endeavour to imitate it, or translate it into English; and this gave rise to my imitations published so long after."[4] In speaking of Pope's youthful efforts, Spence uses the word "imitation" as synonymous with "translation." "Some of his first exercises," he says, "were _imitations_ of the stories that pleased him most in Ovid, or any other poet that he was reading. I have one of these original exercises now by me in his own hand. It is the story of Acis and Galatea, from Ovid; and was _translated_ when he was but fourteen years old."[5] Pope appears to have sometimes employed the term imitation with the same latitude, and probably meant by it that he endeavoured to imitate, in the English turn of expression, the distinctive beauties of the original Latin or Greek. "In the scattered lessons I used to set myself," he said, "I translated above a quarter of the Metamorphoses, and that part of Statius which was afterwards printed with the corrections of Walsh."[6] The notion, in which Bowles and others acquiesced, that the published translations are a true index of Pope's skill at fourteen, will not bear investigation. Of the Metamorphoses he brought out only two little fragments, which appeared many years later, when they had undergone a thorough revision. The rest of the manuscript would not have been sacrificed if the version had been fit for the public eye without the toil of recasting it. Spence, who possessed the Acis and Galatea, did not think it worth printing as a specimen of Pope's boyish abilities, even when the curiosity respecting his works was at its height. The suppression of all his early pieces, which had not been submitted to a subsequent renovation, is a plain proof of their inferiority. The first translation which he gave to the world was the "Episode of Sarpedon, from the twelfth and sixteenth books of Homer's Iliads." This, and his Pastorals, appeared together, in May, 1709, in Tonson's Sixth Miscellany, and Pope was then twenty-one.