But though this is true, I will venture to assert that Chapman also sins, not merely by his love of quaintness, but by constantly indulging in sheer doggerel.
If his lines do not stagnate, they foam and fret like a mountain brook, instead of flowing continuously and majestically like a great river.

He surpasses Pope chiefly, as it seems to me, where Pope's conventional verbiage smothers and conceals some vivid image from nature.

Pope, of course, was a thorough man of forms, and when he has to speak of sea or sky or mountain generally draws upon the current coin of poetic phraseology, which has lost all sharpness of impression in its long circulation.

Here, for example, is Pope's version of a simile in the fourth book:-- As when the winds, ascending by degrees First move the whitening surface of the seas, The billows float in order to the shore, The waves behind roll on the waves before, Till with the growing storm the deeps arise, Foam o'er the rocks, and thunder to the skies.
Each phrase is either wrong or escapes from error by vagueness, and one would swear that Pope had never seen the sea.

Chapman says,-- And as when with the west wind flaws, the sea thrusts up her waves One after other, thick and high, upon the groaning shores, First in herself loud, but opposed with banks and rocks she roars, And all her back in bristles set, spits every way her foam.
This is both clumsy and introduces the quaint and unauthorized image of a pig, but it is unmistakably vivid.