With the product of this subscription, which he had too much discretion to squander, he secured his future life from want, by considerable annuities. The estate of the duke of Buckingham was found to have been charged with five hundred pounds a year, payable to Pope, which, doubtless, his translation enabled him to purchase.
It cannot be unwelcome to literary curiosity, that I deduce thus minutely the history of the English Iliad. It is, certainly, the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen; and its publication must, therefore, be considered as one of the great events in the annals of learning.
To those who have skill to estimate the excellence and difficulty of this great work, it must be very desirable to know how it was performed, and by what gradations it advanced to correctness. Of such an intellectual process the knowledge has very rarely been attainable; but, happily, there remains the original copy of the Iliad, which, being obtained by Bolingbroke, as a curiosity, descended, from him, to Mallet, and is now, by the solicitation of the late Dr. Maty, reposited in the Museum.
Between this manuscript, which is written upon accidental fragments of paper, and the printed edition, there must have been an intermediate copy, that was, perhaps, destroyed as it returned from the press.
From the first copy I have procured a few transcripts, and shall exhibit, first, the printed lines: then, in a smaller print, those of the manuscripts, with all their variations. Those words in the small print, which are given in italicks, are cancelled in the copy, and the words placed under them adopted in their stead.
[Transcriber's Note: the "smaller print" of the original noted in the preceeding paragraph is the doubly-indented block in the following section.]
The beginning of the first book stands thus:
The wrath of Peleus' son, the direful spring Of all the Grecian woes, O goddess, sing; That wrath which hurl'd to Pluto's gloomy reign The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain.
The stern Pelides' _rage_, O goddess, sing, wrath Of all the woes of Greece the fatal spring. Grecian That strew'd with _warriors_ dead the Phrygian plain, heroes And _peopled the dark hell with heroes_ slain; fill'd the shady hell with chiefs untimely.