As I watched him with an indescribable interest in his progress, I had
the satisfaction to find, that, after a few mornings given to
promiscuous correction, and to frequent perusal of the above-mentioned
Notes, he was evidently settling on the sixteenth Book. This he went
regularly through, and the fruits of an application so happily resumed
were, one day with another, about sixty new lines. But with the end of
the sixteenth Book he had closed the corrections of the year. An
excursion to the coast, which immediately followed, though it promised
an accession of strength to the body, could not fail to interfere with
the pursuits of the mind. It was therefore with much less surprise
than regret, that I saw him relinquish the "_Tale of Troy Divine_."

Such was the prelude to the last revisal, which, in the month of
January, ninety-seven, Mr. Cowper was persuaded to undertake; and to a
faithful copy, as I trust, of which, I have at this time the honor to
conduct the reader. But it may not be amiss to observe, that with
regard to the earlier books of the Iliad, it was less a revisal of the
altered text, than of the text as it stands in the first edition. For
though the interleaved copy was always at hand, and in the multitude
of its altered places could hardly fail to offer some things worthy to
be preserved, but which the ravages of illness and the lapse of time
might have utterly effaced from his mind, I could not often persuade
the Translator to consult it. I was therefore induced, in the course
of transcribing, to compare the two revisals as I went along, and to
plead for the continuance of the first correction, when it forcibly
struck me as better than the last. This, however, but seldom occurred;
and the practice, at length, was completely left off, by his
consenting to receive into the number of the books which were daily
laid open before him, the interleaved copy to which I allude.