Wher’ever going—there approved
And only known to be beloved.
Couch, canto ii.
This letter will probably be concluded from Gibraltar, where I may have a better idea of my destination. At present I am tired out with this tedious passage and tossing about from one side of the cabin to the other. The soup in my lap! and my fist in the pudding. Oh dear! Oh dear! But now, please Neptune, we may have a fair wind, and may run into Gibraltar in two or three days. The only amusement on board ship is light reading and making verses. It is quite impossible to bore.
Since I came on board I have read with a good deal of attention for the first time Dryden’s Virgil and Pope’s Homer, from which in themselves I did not derive half so much pleasure as the conviction of Milton’s decided superiority to both.
A man reading a translation cannot of course judge of the language or numbers of the original, but these I believe are not of the first consequence, and Pope is generally esteemed a greater master of both than Milton (though I am myself quite of a contrary opinion); but it is in the thoughts that Milton so astonishingly surpasses, I think, both Homer and Virgil; for surely nobody who reads Paradise Lost, and the Iliad by Pope, can doubt how cumbersome rhyme is to an epic poem, or how much it relaxes the energy of the verse, or how much grander a translation of Homer Milton could have furnished than that for which we are so greatly obliged to Pope. I prefer the Odyssey to the Iliad, and the Georgics to the Æneid, for the latter is something like a servile imitation of the Greek.
By the way, if you have never read Boswell’s Life of Johnson, let me recommend you to a most delicious entertainment. Although the biographer portrays himself an inconceivable goose, I never met with anything so interesting as his book, nor so wonderful as the conversation and universal wisdom of Johnson, whom he will never believe to be a coward, though it were proved in fifty thousand courts—and this indissoluble attachment is with me called rectitude of heart.
* * * * *
Gibraltar, December 4, 1807.
After a most unpleasant passage of thirty-six days, we arrived here on the 1st inst. We have received no intelligence of any sort. Sir John Moore has sailed alone to the westward, and it is supposed that his object is to concert what may be best, by what he may find to have happened at Lisbon. All thoughts of South America seem to have subsided; and if in the end we do return, our advance and enterprise do not seem to be yet quashed, from the orders which the General gives us.