"O race to death devote! with Stygian shade
Each destined peer impending fates invade;
With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned;
With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round:
Thick swarms the spacious hall with howling ghosts,
To people Orcus and the burning coasts!
Nor gives the sun his golden orb to roll,
But universal night usurps the pole."


Who could have conjectured that even Pope would wander away so far
from his matchless original? "Wretches!" cries Theoclymenus, the
seer; and that becomes, "O race to death devote!" "Your heads are
swathed in night," turns into "With Stygian shade each destined
peer" (peer is good!) "impending fates invade," where Homer says
nothing about Styx nor peers. The Latin Orcus takes the place of
Erebus, and "the burning coasts" are derived from modern popular
theology. The very grammar detains or defies the reader; is it the
sun that does not give his golden orb to roll, or who, or what?

The only place where the latter-day Broome or Fenton can flatter
himself that he rivals Pope at his own game is -


"What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!"


This is, if possible, MORE classical than Pope's own -