promise for myself is only that I have done both better than Ogleby, and perhaps as well as Caro. So that, methinks, I come like a malefactor, to make a speech upon the gallows, and to warn all other poets, by my sad example, from the sacrilege of translating Virgil. Yet, by considering him so carefully as I did before my attempt, I have made some faint resemblance of him; and, had I taken more time, might possibly have succeeded better; but never so well, as to have satisfied myself.

He who excels all other poets in his own language, were it possible to do him right, must appear above them in our tongue; which, as my Lord Roscommon justly observes, approaches nearest to the Roman in its majesty: nearest indeed, but with a vast interval betwixt them. There is an inimitable grace in Virgil's words, and in them principally consists that beauty which gives so unexpressible a pleasure to him who best understands their force. This diction of his, I must once again say, is never to be copied; and, since it cannot, he will appear but lame in the best translation. The turns of his verse, his breakings, his propriety, his numbers, and his gravity, I have as far imitated as the poverty of our language and the hastiness of my performance would allow. I may seem sometimes to have varied from his sense; but I think the greatest variations may be fairly deduc'd from him; and where I leave his commentators, it may be I understand him better at least I writ without consulting them in many places. But two particular lines in Mezentius and Lausus I cannot so easily excuse. They are indeed remotely allied to Virgil's sense; but they are too like the trifling tenderness of Ovid, and were printed before I had consider'd them enough to alter them. The first of them I have forgotten, and cannot easily retrieve, because the copy is at the press; the second is this:

When Lausus died, I was already slain. This appears pretty enough at first sight; but I am convinc'd for many reasons that the expression is too bold; that Virgil would not have said it, tho' Ovid would. The reader may pardon it, if he please, for the freeness of the confession; and instead of that, and the former, admit these two lines, which are more according to the author:

Nor ask I life, nor fought with that design;
As I had us'd my fortune, use thou thine.

Having with much ado got clear of Virgil, I have, in the next place, to consider the genius of Lucretius, whom I have translated more happily in those parts of him which I undertook. If he was not of the best age of Roman

poetry, he was at least of that which preceded it; and he himself refin'd it to that degree of perfection, both in the language and the thoughts, that he left an easy task to Virgil; who, as he succeeded him in time, so he copied his excellencies: for the method of the Georgics is plainly deriv'd from him. Lucretius had chosen a subject naturally crabbed; he therefore adorn'd it with poetical descriptions, and precepts of morality, in the beginning and ending of his books, which you see Virgil has imitated with great success, in those four books, which in my opinion are more perfect in their kind than even his divine Eneids. The turn of his verse he has likewise follow'd, in those places which Lucretius has most labor'd, and some of his very lines he has transplanted into his own works, without much variation. If I am not mistaken, the distinguishing character of Lucretius (I mean of his soul and genius) is a certain kind of noble pride, and positive assertion of his opinions. He is everywhere confident of his own reason, and assuming an absolute command, not only over his vulgar reader, but even his patron Memmius. For he is always bidding him attend, as if he had the rod over him, and using a magisterial authority, while he instructs him. From his time to ours, I know none so like him as our poet and philosopher of Malmesbury. This is that perpetual dictatorship which is exercis'd by Lucretius; who, tho' often in the wrong, yet seems to deal bona fide with his reader, and tells him nothing but what he thinks: in which plain sincerity, I believe, he differs from our Hobbes, who could not but be convinc'd, or at least doubt of some eternal truths, which he has oppos'd. But for Lucretius, he seems to disdain all manner of replies, and is so confident of his cause, that he is beforehand with his antagonists; urging for them whatever he imagin'd they could say, and leaving them, as he supposes, without an objection for the future; all this too, with so much scorn and indignation, as if he were assur'd of the triumph, before he enter'd into the lists. From this sublime and daring genius of his, it must of necessity come to pass, that his thoughts must be masculine, full of argumentation, and that sufficiently warm. From the same fiery temper proceeds the loftiness of his expressions, and the perpetual torrent of his verse, where the barrenness of his subject does not too much constrain the quickness of his fancy. For there is no doubt to be made, but that he could have been everywhere as poetical as he is in his descriptions, and in the moral part of his philosophy, if he had not aim'd more to instruct, in his System of Nature, than to delight. But he was bent upon making Memmius a materialist, and teaching him to defy an invisible

power. In short, he was so much an atheist, that he forgot sometimes to be a poet. These are the considerations which I had of that author, before I attempted to translate some parts of him. And accordingly I laid by my natural diffidence and scepticism for a while, to take up that dogmatical way of his, which, as I said, is so much his character, as to make him that individual poet. As for his opinions concerning the mortality of the soul, they are so absurd, that I cannot, if I would, believe them. I think a future state demonstrable even by natural arguments; at least, to take away rewards and punishments, is only a pleasing prospect to a man, who resolves beforehand not to live morally. But on the other side, the thought of being nothing after death is a burden unsupportable to a virtuous man, even tho' a heathen. We naturally aim at happiness, and cannot bear to have it confin'd to the shortness of our present being, especially when we consider that virtue is generally unhappy in this world, and vice fortunate: so that 'tis hope of futurity alone that makes this life tolerable, in expectation of a better. Who would not commit all the excesses to which he is prompted by his natural inclinations, if he may do them with security while he is alive, and be uncapable of punishment after he is dead! If he be cunning and secret enough to avoid the laws, there is no band of morality to restrain him: for fame and reputation are weak ties; many men have not the least sense of them; powerful men are only aw'd by them, as they conduce to their interest, and that not always, when a passion is predominant; and no man will be contain'd within the bounds of duty, when he may safely transgress them. These are my thoughts abstractedly, and without ent'ring into the notions of our Christian faith, which is the proper business of divines.

But there are other arguments in this poem (which I have turn'd into English) not belonging to the mortality of the soul, which are strong enough to a reasonable man, to make him less in love with life, and consequently in less apprehensions of death: such as are the natural satiety proceeding from a perpetual enjoyment of the same things; the inconveniences of old age, which make him uncapable of corporeal pleasures; the decay of understanding and memory, which render him contemptible and useless to others. These, and many other reasons, so pathetically urg'd, so beautifully express'd, so adorn'd with examples, and so admirably rais'd by the prosopopeia of Nature, who is brought in speaking to her children, with so much authority and vigor, deserve the pains I have taken with them, which I hope have not been unsuccessful,

or unworthy of my author. At least I must take the liberty to own that I was pleas'd with my own endeavors, which but rarely happens to me, and that I am not dissatisfied upon the review of anything I have done in this author.

'Tis true, there is something, and that of some moment, to be objected against my Englishing the Nature of Love, from the fourth book of Lucretius; and I can less easily answer why I translated it, than why I thus translated it. The objection arises from the obscenity of the subject, which is aggravated by the too lively and alluring delicacy of the verses. In the first place, without the least formality of an excuse, I own it pleas'd me: and let my enemies make the worst they can of this confession; I am not yet so secure from that passion, but that I want my author's antidotes against it. He has given the truest and most philosophical account both of the disease and remedy, which I ever found in any author: for which reasons I translated him. But it will be ask'd why I turn'd him into this luscious English - for I will not give it a worse word. Instead of an answer, I would ask again of my supercilious adversaries, whether I am not bound, when I translate an author, to do him all the right I can, and to translate him to the best advantage? If, to mince his meaning, which I am satisfied was honest and instructive, I had either omitted some part of what he said, or taken from the strength of his expression, I certainly had wrong'd him; and that freeness of thought and words being thus cashier'd in my hands, he had no longer been Lucretius. If nothing of this kind be to be read, physicians must not study nature, anatomies must not be seen, and somewhat I could say of particular passages in books, which, to avoid profaneness, I do not name. But the intention qualifies the act; and both mine and my author's were to instruct as well as please. 'Tis most certain that barefac'd bawdry is the poorest pretense to wit imaginable. If I should say otherwise, I should have two great authorities against me. The one is the Essay on Poetry, which I publicly valued before I knew the author of it, and with the commendation of which my Lord Roscommon so happily begins his Essay on Translated Verse; the other is no less than our admir'd Cowley, who says the same thing in other words: for in his Ode concerning Wit, he writes thus of it:

Much less can that have any place,
At which a virgin hides her face:

Such dross the fire must purge away; 't is just
The author blush, there where the reader must.

Here indeed Mr. Cowley goes farther than the Essay; for he asserts plainly that obscenity has no place in wit; the other only says, 't is

a poor pretense to it, or an ill sort of wit, which has nothing more to support it than barefac'd ribaldry; which is both unmannerly in itself, and fulsome to the reader. But neither of these will reach my case: for in the first place, I am only the translator, not the inventor; so that the heaviest part of the censure falls upon Lucretius, before it reaches me; in the next place, neither he nor I have us'd the grossest words, but the cleanliest metaphors we could find, to palliate the broadness of the meaning; and, to conclude, have carried the poetical part no farther than the philosophical exacted.

There is one mistake of mine which I will not lay to the printer's charge, who has enough to answer for in false pointings. 'Tis in the word viper; I would have the verse run thus:

The scorpion, love, must on the wound be bruis'd. There are a sort of blundering half-witted people, who make a great deal of noise about a verbal slip; tho' Horace would instruct them better in true criticism:

-Non ego paucis
Offendor maculis quas aut incuria fudit,
Aut humana parum cavit natura.

True judgment in poetry, like that in painting, takes a view of the whole together, whether it be good or not; and where the beauties are more than the faults, concludes for the poet against the little judge. 'Tis a sign that malice is hard driven, when 't is forc'd to lay hold on a word or syllable: to arraign a man is one thing, and to cavil at him is another. In the midst of an ill-natur'd generation of scribblers, there is always justice enough left in mankind to protect good writers; and they too are oblig'd, both by humanity and interest, to espouse each other's cause against false critics, who are the common enemies.

This last consideration puts me in mind of what I owe to the ingenious and learned translator of Lucretius. I have not here design'd to rob him of any part of that commendation which he has so justly acquir'd by the whole author, whose fragments only fall to my portion. What I have now perform'd, is no more than I intended above twenty years ago. The ways of our translation are very different; he follows him more closely than I have done, which became an interpreter of the whole poem: I take more liberty, because it best suited with my design, which was to make him as pleasing as I could. He had been too voluminous, had he us'd my method in so long a work; and I had certainly taken his, had I made it my business to translate the whole. The preference then is justly his; and I join with Mr. Evelyn in the confession of it, with this additional advantage to him, that his reputation is already establish'd in this poet, mine

is to make its fortune in the world. If I have been anywhere obscure, in following our common author, or if Lucretius himself is to be condemn'd, I refer myself to his excellent annotations, which I have often read, and always with some new pleasure.

My preface begins already to swell upon me, and looks as if I were afraid of my reader, by so tedious a bespeaking of him: and yet I have Horace and Theocritus upon my hands; but the Greek gentleman shall quickly be dispatch'd, because I have more business with the Roman.

That which distinguishes Theocritus from all other poets, both Greek and Latin, and which raises him even above Virgil in his Eclogues, is the inimitable tenderness of his passions, and the natural expression of them in words so becoming of a pastoral. A simplicity shines thro' all he writes; he shows his art and learning by disguising both. His shepherds never rise above their country education in their complaints of love. There is the same difference betwixt him and Virgil, as there is betwixt Tasso's Aminta and the Pastor Fido of Guarini. Virgil's shepherds are too well-read in the philosophy of Epicurus and of Plato, and Guarini's seem to have been bred in courts; but Theocritus and Tasso have taken theirs from cottages and plains. It was said of Tasso, in relation to his similitudes, mai esce del bosco ; that he never departed from the woods, that is, all his comparisons were taken from the country. The same may be said of our Theocritus. He is softer than Ovid; he touches the passions more delicately and performs all this out of his own fond, without diving into the arts and sciences for a supply. Even his Doric dialect has an incomparable sweetness in its clownishness, like a fair shepherdess in her country russet, talking in a Yorkshire tone. This was impossible for Virgil to imitate, because the severity of the Roman language denied him that advantage. Spenser has endeavor'd it in his Shepherds' Calendar; but neither will it succeed in English; for which reason I forbore to attempt it. For Theocritus writ to Sicilians, who spoke that dialect; and I direct this part of my translations to our ladies, who neither understand nor will take pleasure in such homely expressions. I proceed to Horace.

Take him in parts, and he is chiefly to be consider'd in his three different talents, as he was a critic, a satirist, and a writer of odes. His morals are uniform, and run thro' all of them; for, let his Dutch commentators say what they will, his philosophy was Epicurean; and he made use of gods and providence only to serve a turn in poetry. But since neither his criticisms, which are the most instructive of any

that are written in this art, nor his satires, which are incomparably beyond Juvenal's, if to laugh and rally is to be preferr❜d to railing and declaiming, are any part of my present undertaking, I confine myself wholly to his odes. These are also of several sorts: some of them are panegyrical, others moral, the rest jovial, or (if I may so call them) Bacchanalian. As difficult as he makes it, and as indeed it is, to imitate Pindar, yet, in his most elevated flights, and in the sudden changes of his subject with almost imperceptible connections, that Theban poet is his master. But Horace is of the more bounded fancy, and confines himself strictly to one sort of verse, or stanza, in every ode. That which will distinguish his style from all other poets is the elegance of his words, and the numerousness of his verse: there is nothing so delicately turn'd in all the Roman language. There appears in every part of his diction, or (to speak English) in all his expressions, a kind of noble and bold purity. His words are chosen with as much exactness as Virgil's; but there seems to be a greater spirit in them. There is a secret happiness attends his choice, which in Petronius is called curiosa felicitas, and which I suppose he had from the feliciter audere of Horace himself. But the most distinguishing part of all his character seems to me to be his briskness, his jollity, and his good humor; and those I have chiefly endeavor'd to copy. His other excellencies, I confess, are above my imitation. One ode, which infinitely pleas'd me in the reading, I have attempted to translate in Pindaric verse: 't is that which is inscrib'd to the present Earl of Rochester, to whom I have particular obligations, which this small testimony of my gratitude can never pay. "T is his darling in the Latin, and I have taken some pains to make it my masterpiece in English; for which reason I took this kind of verse, which allows more latitude than any other. Everyone knows it was introduc'd into our language, in this age, by the happy genius of Mr. Cowley. The seeming easiness of it has made it spread; but it has not been consider'd enough, to be so well cultivated. It languishes in almost every hand but his, and some very few, whom, to keep the rest in countenance, I do not name. He, indeed, has brought it as near perfection as was possible in so short a time. But if I may be allow'd to speak my mind modestly, and without injury to his sacred ashes, somewhat of the purity of English, somewhat of more equal thoughts, somewhat of sweetness in the numbers, in one word, somewhat of a finer turn, and more lyrical verse, is yet wanting. As for the soul of it, which consists in the warmth and vigor of fancy, the masterly figures, and the copiousness of imagination, he has excell'd all others in this kind.

Yet, if the kind itself be capable of more perfection, tho' rather in the ornamental parts of it, than the essential, what rules of morality or respect have I broken, in naming the defects, that they may hereafter be amended? Imitation is a nice point, and there are few poets who deserve to be models in all they write. Milton's Paradise Lost is admirable; but am I therefore bound to maintain that there are no flats amongst his elevations, when 't is evident he creeps along sometimes, for above an hundred lines together? Cannot I admire the height of his invention, and the strength of his expression, without defending his antiquated words, and the perpetual harshness of their sound? 'Tis as much commendation as a man can bear, to own him excellent; all beyond it is idolatry.

Since Pindar was the prince of lyric poets, let me have leave to say that, in imitating him, our numbers should, for the most part, be lyrical. For variety, or rather where the majesty of the thought requires it, they may be stretch'd to the English heroic of five feet, and to the French Alexandrine of six. But the ear must preside, and direct the judgment to the choice of numbers. Without the nicety of this, the harmony of Pindaric verse can never be complete the cadency of one line must be a rule to that of the next; and the sound of the former must slide gently into that which follows, without leaping from one extreme into another. It must be done like the shadowings of a picture, which fall by degrees into a darker color. I shall be glad, if I have so explain'd myself as to be understood; but if I have not, quod nequeo dicere, et sentio tantum, must be my excuse.

There remains much more to be said on this subject; but, to avoid envy, I will be silent. What I have said is the general opinion of the best judges, and in a manner has been forc'd from me, by seeing a noble sort of poetry so happily restor❜d by one man, and so grossly copied by almost all the rest. A musical ear, and a great genius, if another Mr. Cowley could arise, in another age may bring it to perfection. In the mean time:

Fungar vice cotis, acutum
Reddere quæ ferrum valet, expers ipsa secandi.

I hope it will not be expected from me that I should say anything of my fellow-undertakers in this Miscellany. Some of them are too nearly related to me to be commended without suspicion of partiality: others, I am sure, need it not; and the rest I have not perus'd.

To conclude, I am sensible that I have written this too hastily and too loosely: I fear I have been tedious, and, which is worse, it comes out from the first draught, and uncorrected.

This, I grant, is no excuse; for it may be reasonably urg'd, why did he not write with more leisure, or, if he had it not, (which was certainly my case,) why did he attempt to write on so nice a subject? The objection is unanswerable; but in part of recompense, let me assure the reader, that, in hasty productions, he is sure to meet with an author's present sense, which cooler thoughts would possibly have disguis'd. There is undoubtedly more of spirit, tho' not of judgment, in these uncorrect essays, and consequently, tho' my hazard be the greater, yet the reader's pleasure is not the less. JOHN DRYDEN.