This must be said for our translation, that if we give not the whole sense of Juvenal, yet we give the most considerable part of it, we give it, in general, so clearly, that few notes are sufficient to make us intelligible. We make our author at least appear in a poetic dress. We have actually made him more sounding, and more elegant, than he was before in English: and have endeavoured to make him speak that kind of English, which he would have spoken had he lived in England, and had written to this age. If sometimes any of us (and it is but seldom) make him express the customs and manners of our native country, rather than of Rome, it is, either when there was some kind of analogy, betwixt their customs and ours; or when, to make him more easy to vulgar understandings, we give him those manners which are familiar to us. But I defend not this innovation, it is enough if I can excuse it. For, to speak sincerely, the manners of nations and ages are not to be confounded: we should either make them English, or leave them Roman. If this can neither be defended, nor excused, let it be pardoned, at least, because it is acknowledged and so much the more easily, as being a fault which is never committed without some pleasure to the reader.

Thus, my Lord, having troubled you with a tedious visit, the best manners will be shown in the least ceremony. I will slip away while your back is turned, and while you are otherwise employed: with great confusion, for having entertained you so long with this discourse; and for having no other recompense to make you, than the worthy labours

of my fellow-undertakers in this work, and the thankful acknowledgments, prayers, and perpetual

good wishes, of,

My Lord,

Your Lordship's

Most obliged, most humble,

And most obedient servant,

JOHN DRYDEN.

Aug. 18, 1692.

ESSAY ON TRANSLATION.

FOR this last half-year I have been troubled with the disease (as I may call it) of translation: the cold prose fits of it, which are always the most tedious, with me, were spent in the history of the League; the hot, which succeeded them, in verse miscellanies. The truth is, I fancied to myself a kind of ease in the change of the paroxysm; never suspecting but the humour would have wasted itself in two or three pastorals of Theocritus, and as many odes of Horace. But finding, or at least thinking I found, something that was more pleasing in them than my ordinary productions, I encouraged myself to renew my old acquaintance with Lucretius and Virgil; and immediately fixed upon some parts of them, which had most affected me in the reading. These were my natural impulses for the undertaking. But there was an accidental motive which was full as forcible. It was my Lord Roscommon's essay on translated verse; which made me uneasy till I tried whether or no I was capable of following his rules, and of reducing the speculation into practice. For many. a fair precept in poetry is, like a seeming demonstration in the mathematics, very specious in the

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diagram, but failing in the mechanic operation. think I have generally observed his instructions ; I am sure my reason is sufficiently convinced both of their truth and usefulness; which, in other words, is to confess no less a vanity, than to pretend that I have at least in some places made examples to his rules. Yet, withal, I must acknowledge, that I have many times exceeded my commission: for I have both added and omitted, and even sometimes very boldly made such expositions of my authors, as no Dutch commentator will forgive me. Perhaps, in such particular passages, I have thought that I discovered some beauty yet undiscovered by those pedants, which none but a poet could have found. Where I have taken away some of their expressions, and cut them shorter, it may possibly be on this consideration, that what was beautiful in the Greek or Latin, would not appear so shining in the English. And where I have enlarged them, I desire the false critics would not always think, that those thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly. in the poet, or may be fairly deduced from him; or at least, if both those considerations should fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they are such as he would probably have written.

For, after all, a translator is to make his author appear as charming as possibly he can, provided he maintains his character, and makes him not unlike himself. Translation is a kind of drawing after the life where every one will acknowledge there is a double sort of likeness, a good one and a bad. It is one thing to draw the outlines true, the features like, the proportions exact, the colouring itself per

haps tolerable; and another thing to make all these graceful, by the posture, the shadowings, and chiefly by the spirit which animates the whole. I cannot, without some indignation, look on an ill copy of an excellent original. Much less can I behold with patience Virgil, Homer, and some others, whose beauties I have been endeavouring all my life to imitate, so abused, as I may say, to their faces, by a botching interpreter. What English readers, unacquainted with Greek or Latin, will believe me, or any other man, when we commend those authors, and confess we derive all that is pardonable in us from their fountains, if they take those to be the same poets, whom our Ogilbys have translated? But I dare assure them, that a good poet is no more like himself, in a dull translation, than his carcass would be to his living body. There are many who understand Greek and Latin, and yet are ignorant of their mother tongue. The proprieties and delicacies of the English are known to few: it is impossible even for a good wit to understand and practise them, without the help of a liberal education, long reading, and digesting of those few good authors we have amongst us, the knowledge of men and manners, the freedom of habitudes and conversation with the best of company of both sexes; and, in short, without wearing off the rust, which he contracted while he was laying in a stock of learning. Thus difficult it is to understand the purity of English, and critically to discern not only good writers from bad, and a proper style from a corrupt, but also to distinguish that which is pure in a good author, from that which is vicious and corrupt in him. And for want of all

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