I I 2 PROSERPINA. 



Next, Pope : — 



" He missed the mark ; but pierced Gorgythio's heart, 

 And drenched in royal blood the thirsty dart : 

 (Fair Castianeira, nymph of form divine, 

 This offspring added to King Priam's line). 

 As full-blown poppies, overcharged with rain, 

 Decline the head, and drooping kiss the plain, 

 So sinks the youth : his beauteous head, depressed 

 Beneath his helmet, drops upon his breast." 



13. I give you the two passages in full, trust- 

 ing that you may so feel the becomingness of 

 the one, and the gracelessness of the other. But 

 note farther, in the Homeric passage, one subtlety 

 which cannot enough be marked even in Chapman's 

 English, that his second word, i^tucre, is employed 

 by him both of the stooping of ears of corn, under 

 wind, and of Troy stooping to its ruin ; * and other- 

 wise, in good Greek writers, the word is marked 

 as having such specific sense of men's drooping 

 under weight ; or towards death, under the burden 

 of fortune which they have no more strength to 

 sustain ; f compare the passage I quoted from 



* See all the passages quoted by Liddell. 



f I find this chapter rather tiresome on re-reading it myself, and 

 cancel some farther criticism of the imitation of this passage by Virgil, 

 one of the few pieces of the ^ineid which are purely and vulgarly imita- 

 tive, rendered also false as well as weak by the introducing sentence, 

 " Volvitur Euryalus leto," after which the simile of the drooping flower 

 is absurd. Of criticism, the chief use of which is to warn all sensible 

 men from such business, the following abstract of Diderot's notes on 

 the passage, given in the 'Saturday Review' for April 20, 1871, is 



