PREFACE
PREPARED BY MR. COWPER,
FOR A
SECOND EDITION.


Soon after my publication of this work, I began to prepare it for a
second edition, by an accurate revisal of the first. It seemed to me,
that here and there, perhaps a slight alteration might satisfy the
demands of some, whom I was desirous to please; and I comforted myself
with the reflection, that if I still failed to conciliate all, I
should yet have no cause to account myself in a singular degree
unfortunate. To please an unqualified judge, an author must sacrifice
too much; and the attempt to please an uncandid one were altogether
hopeless. In one or other of these classes may be ranged all such
objectors, as would deprive blank verse of one of its principal
advantages, the variety of its pauses; together with all such as deny
the good effect, on the whole, of a line, now and then, less
harmonious than its fellows.

With respect to the pauses, it has been affirmed with an unaccountable
rashness, that HOMER himself has given me an example of verse without
them. Had this been true, it would by no means have concluded against
the use of them in an English version of HOMER; because, in one
language, and in one species of metre, that may be musical, which in
another would be found disgusting. But the assertion is totally