In more martial and stirring passages the failure is more signal, and here especially we feel that if Pope's rhyming couplets are sorry equivalents for the Homeric hexameter, blank verse is superior to them only in a negative way.

The real equivalent, if any, is the romance metre of Scott, parts of whose poems, notably the last canto of _Marmion_ and some passages in the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, are about the most Homeric things in our language.

Cowper brought such poetic gifts to his work that his failure might have deterred others from making the same hopeless attempt.

But a failure his work is; the translation is no more a counterpart of the original, than the Ouse creeping through its meadows is the counterpart of the Aegean rolling before a fresh wind and under a bright sun.

Pope delights school-boys; Cowper delights nobody, though on the rare occasions when he is taken from the shelf, he commends himself, in a certain measure, to the taste and judgment of cultivated men.
In his translations of Horace, both those from the Satires and those from the Odes, Cowper succeeds far better.