Gilbert West (1700?–1756) translated the Odes of Pindar (1749), prefixing to the work,—which is still our standard version of Pindar—a good dissertation on the Olympic games. New editions of West’s Pindar were published in 1753 and 1766. He wrote several pieces of original poetry, included in Dodsley’s collection. One of these, “On the Abuse of Travelling,” a canto in imitation of Spenser (1739) is noticed by Gray in enthusiastic terms. West was also author of a prose work, “Observations on the Resurrection,” for which the university of Oxford conferred on him the degree of LL.D.; and Lyttelton addressed to him his treatise on St. Paul. Pope left West a sum of £200, but payable after the death of Martha Blount, and he did not live to receive it. By all his contemporaries, this accomplished and excellent man was warmly esteemed; and through the influence of Pitt, he enjoyed a competence in his latter days, having been appointed (1752) one of the clerks of the privy council, and under-treasurer of Chelsea Hospital.
Personal
Perhaps it may not be without effect to tell, that he read the prayers of the public liturgy every morning to his family, and that on Sunday evening he called his servants into the parlour, and read to them first a sermon, and then prayers. Crashaw is now not the only maker of verses to whom may be given the two venerable names of Poet and Saint.
General
Now I talk of verses, Mr. Walpole and I have frequently wondered you should never mention a certain imitation of Spenser, published last year [May, 1739], by a namesake of yours, with which we are all enraptured and enmarvailed.
Lord Cobham’s West has published his translation of Pindar; the poetry is very stiff, but prefixed to it there is a very entertaining account of the Olympic games, and that preceded by an affected inscription to Pitt and Lyttelton.
He hath not made use [in his “Observations on the Resurrection”] of strained and arbitrary suppositions, but such as seem clearly to arise from the accounts of the evangelists, carefully considered and compared.
See a learned and judicious discourse on the Olympic games which Mr. West has prefixed to his translation of Pindar…. Affords much curious and authentic information.
Of his translations I have only compared the first Olympic ode with the original, and found my expectation surpassed, both by its elegance and its exactness. He does not confine himself to his author’s train of stanzas; for he saw that the difference of the languages required a different mode of versification. The first strophe is eminently happy; in the second he has a little strayed from Pindar’s meaning…. A work of this kind, must in a minute examination, discover many imperfections; but West’s version, so far as I have considered it, appears to be the product of great labour and great abilities. His “Institution of the Garter” (1742) is written with sufficient knowledge of the manners that prevailed in the age to which it is referred, and with great elegance of diction; but, for want of a process of events, neither knowledge nor elegance preserve the reader from weariness. His “Imitations of Spenser” are very successfully performed, both with respect to the metre, the language and the fiction; and being engaged at once by the excellence of the sentiments, and the artifice of the copy, the mind has two amusements together.
I shall endeavour to account for the decline of poetry after the age of Shakspeare and Spenser, in spite of the great exceptions during the Commonwealth, and to trace the effect produced by the restorers of a better taste, of whom Thomson and Gilbert West are to be esteemed as the chief.
The poems of West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction; but they were cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-colored.
His work is noticed here on account of the luminous and satisfactory manner in which he has harmonized the several accounts of the evangelical history of the resurrection.
This is one of the acutest and best-reasoned works which have appeared in English on the Resurrection of Christ.
West’s two imitations of Spenser are excellent, not merely as Johnson seems to say, for their ingenuity, but for their fulness of thought and vigor of expression.
Besides other verse, he published a translation of a portion of the odes of Pindar, which had long considerable reputation, but is not very Pindaric, though a smooth and sonorous performance. The one of his works that has best kept its ground is his prose tract entitled “Observations on the Resurrection,” a very able and ingenious disquisition.
He has left some name in theology by his “Observations on the Resurrection,” and in poetry by his translation of Pindar, and his “Imitations of Spenser.” His writings in both kinds are the productions of a cultivated rather than of a vigorous mind, and the criticism of Coleridge on his poems exactly describes the general character of his works.
