Lives, To be so well deluded by their Wives. The poet also contributed a translation, The Episode of Sarpedon, Translated from the Twelfth and Sixteenth Books of Homer's Iliads (pages 301–323). John Denham, a poet of Dryden's generation, had written the best-known translation of Sarpedon's speech. According to the 20th-century critic and Pope biographer Maynard Mack, Pope's version shined in comparison, and when both versions were weighed together, "the coffee-house critics must have sensed [...] that a new star of some magnitude was rising in their sky". But the four Pastorals (pages 721–751) which concluded the volume, would have been the works on which Pope pinned most of his hopes for recognition, according to Mack, because the genre was what Virgil and various Renaissance critics deemed a proper first test for an aspiring poet. On May 17, Pope's friend, Wycherley, wrote to him that "all the best Judges [...] like your part of the Book so well, that the rest is lik'd the worse". Pope wrote back three days later, referring to Tonson's low payments but valuable publicizing (by including him in what the title page of the anthology called "Eminent hands"): I can be content with a bare saving [that is, neither winning nor losing] game, without being thought an Eminent hand, (with which Title Jacob has graciously dignify'd his adventurers and voluntiers in Poetry). Jacob creates Poets, as Kings sometimes do Knights, not for their honour, but for money. Certainly he ought to be esteem'd a worker of Miracles, who is grown rich by Poetry. What Authors lose, their Booksellers have won, So Pimps grow rich, while Gallants are undone. Births Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article: Early 1709? – John Armstrong (died 1779), Scottish poet and physician January 17 – George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton (died 1773), English statesman, patron of the arts and poet April 15 – , writing as Crescentius Koromandel (died 1777), German poet August 7 – Jean-Jacques Lefranc, Marquis de Pompignan (died 1784), French polymathic writer September 18 (N.S.) – Samuel Johnson (died 1784), English author, critic, lexicographer and poet Also: John Bancks or Banks (died 1751), English poet, bookseller and biographer Robert Nugent, 1st Earl Nugent (died 1788), Irish statesman and poet Laetitia Pilkington, born Laetitia van Lewen, born c. 1708 or 1709 (died 1750), Anglo-Irish poet and memoirist Deaths Birth years link to the corresponding "[year] in