sort, partly in direct sympathy with the action of the play, are exactly the rôle of the chorus in Greek tragedy. In one point only we may say that here Milton is deficient--in that lyrical sweetness which marks many of the choruses of Sophocles and Euripides, so that we can recite them as independent poems. Probably Milton felt his subject too great and gloomy for such poetical digressions. For when he chose to give us lyrical sweetness, what can exceed his _Comus_? Nor do I know anything more Greek than the lovely though learned lyrical poetry toward the close of that immortal masque. I now pass from the father of English classical poetry to later but not more varied manifestations of Greek influence. The most remarkable work in the early eighteenth century, which took all England by storm, was Pope’s translation of the _Iliad_. Chapman’s was already there, a very meritorious work, and now rated more highly than its successor. But in Pope’s day style was paramount. The _Iliad_ must read as a great English poem, and we have Homer dressed in eighteenth-century costume, just as the boys that played Terence at Westminster played him in wigs, powder, and patches. It is very easy to criticise Pope’s translation. His whole attitude was like that of Watteau in landscape; his epithets were generally wrong, and wrong in principle. “And the conscious swain blesses the useful light” is the conclusion of a simile. Now Homer’s swain was not conscious, nor did he bless the light as useful.[6] Thus we see in Jacques Carrey’s now invaluable drawings of the Parthenon--for they were done a few years before its disaster--that he could not even copy Phidias’s work before him, without importing the style of the seventeenth-century Frenchman. All these things are true and obvious, and yet the poet, who in translating another, recasts him into his own mould, though he be faithless as a translator, may be far greater as a poet. Ever since I was introduced to Homer by Pope, more than fifty years ago, I have felt that, with all its anachronisms, Pope’s poem is the greatest and best version of the Greek master, and a proper one for those to read who cannot approach the original. No prose translation, however scholarly and accurate, can give the least idea of the swing of the great epic, and so I feel that the influence of Homer through Pope has been wide and lasting and that the very defects of so great a performance have stimulated oft-renewed attempts at reproducing the great masterpiece. Dryden’s Virgil of course led public taste in the same direction, so that we have an age very diverse from Greek in taste, and very incongruous to it, nevertheless dominated, perhaps even more than people then imagined, by Greek classical models.