Pope delights school-boys;
Cowper delights nobody, though on the rare occasions when he is taken
from the shelf, he commends himself, in a certain measure, to the taste
and judgment of cultivated men.
In his translations of Horace, both those from the Satires and those
from the Odes, Cowper succeeds far better. Horace requires in his
translator little of the fire which Cowper lacked. In the Odes he
requires grace, in the Satires urbanity and playfulness, all of which
Cowper had in abundance. Moreover, Horace is separated from us by no
intellectual gulf. He belongs to what Dr. Arnold called the modern
period of ancient history. Nor is Cowper's translation of part of the
eighth book of Virgil's Aeneid bad, in spite of the heaviness of the
blank verse. Virgil, like Horace, is within his intellectual range.
As though a translation of the whole of the Homeric poems had not been
enough to bury his finer faculty, and prevent him from giving us any
more of the minor poems, the publishers seduced him into undertaking an
edition of Milton, which was to eclipse all its predecessors in
splendour.
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