Yet, as between the Greek and Roman poet, it should seem that the former ought to have been more congenial to Dryden, and the latter to Pope. In many of the points where Pope was farthest from Homer he was nearest to Virgil—not least in his love of antithesis, his epigram and point, his brilliant rhetoric, the studied elegance, nay, the artifice, of his style. Even in his most didactic vein he would scarcely have been so far from Virgil as in his most epic strain he was from Homer. Virgil is not averse to a bit of sermonizing sub rosa; he writes with a moral; his Æneas is a sort of fighting parson born before his time. One cannot help feeling, too, in his most impassioned moments, that he is writing with his eye on his style, as Pope always is, as we can never fancy Homer doing. Is the rhetorical artifice any less plain in
“O dolor atque decus magnum rediture parenti”
than in
“Daphne, our grief, our glory, now no more”?
Is the antithesis less pointed in
“Qui candore nives anteirent, cursibus auras”
than in
“Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind”?
There are hardly more lines of the kind in Pope than in the Æneid.
When, therefore, Mr. Cranch tells us that he has taken blank-verse rather than the rhymed couplet in order to avoid the appearance of antithesis, and to secure the clear simplicity and directness of his original, he shows us where to look for some of his failures. His simplicity is too often baldness, his directness not seldom prose, and to the pointedness of the Latin he does much less than ample justice. His blank-verse seems to us monotonous in its modulation and is not always correct. Lines like the following occur too often: