Hang them!—­I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child.

As to the translations, let me do two or three hundred lines, and then do you try the nostrums upon Stuart in any way you please.  If they go down, I will bray more.  In fact, if I got or could but get L50 a year only, in addition to what I have, I should live in affluence.

Have you anticipated it, or could not you give a parallel of Bonaparte with Cromwell, particularly as to the contrast in their deeds affecting foreign States?  Cromwell’s interference for the Albigenses, B[onaparte]’s against the Swiss.  Then religion would come in; and Milton and you could rant about our countrymen of that period.  This is a hasty suggestion, the more hasty because I want my supper.  I have just finished Chapman’s Homer.  Did you ever read it?  It has most the continuous power of interesting you all along, like a rapid original, of any, and in the uncommon excellence of the more finished parts goes beyond Fairfax or any of ’em.  The metre is fourteen syllables, and capable of all sweetness and grandeur, Cowper’s ponderous blank verse detains you every step with some heavy Miltonism; Chapman gallops off with you his own free pace.  Take a simile, for example.  The council breaks up,—­

                “Being abroad, the earth was overlaid
    With fleckers to them, that came forth; as when of frequent
       bees
    Swarms rise out of a hollow rock, repairing the degrees
    Of their egression endlessly,—­with ever rising new
    From forth their sweet nest; as their store, still as it faded,
       grew,

“And never would cease sending forth her dusters to the spring.  They still crowd out so:  this flock here, that there, belaboring The loaded flowers.  So,” etc.

What endless egression of phrases the dog commands!

Take another.—­Agamemnon, wounded, bearing hiss wound, heroically for the sake of the army (look below) to a woman in labor:—­

  “He with his lance, sword, mighty stones, poured his heroic wreak
  On other squadrons of the foe, whiles yet warm blood did break
  Thro’ his cleft veins:  but when the wound was quite exhaust and crude,
  The eager anguish did approve his princely fortitude. 
  As when most sharp and bitter pangs distract a laboring dame,
  Which the divine Ilithiae, that rule the painful frame
  Of human childbirth, pour on her; the Ilithiae that are
  The daughters of Saturnia; with whose extreme repair
  The woman in her travail strives to take the worst it gives;
  With thought, it must be, ’tis love’s fruit, the end for which
        she lives;
  The mean to make herself new born, what comforts will redound! 
  So,” etc.

I will tell you more about Chapman and his peculiarities in my next.  I am much interested in him.