I will not burthen your lordship with more of them; for I write to a mafter who understands them better than myself. But I may fafely conclude them to be great beauties.-I might defcend alfo to the 'mechanic beauties of heroic verfe; but we have yet no English profodia, not fo much as a tolerable dictionary, or a grammar; fo that our language is in a manner barbarous; and what government will encourage any one, or more, who are capable of refining it, I know not; but nothing under a public expence can go through with it. And I rather fear a declination of the language, than hope an advancement of it in the present age.

I am still speaking to you, my lord, though, in all probability, you are already out of hearing. Nothing, which my meannefs can produce, is worthy of this long attention. But I am come to the last petition of Abraham; if there be ten righteous lines, in this vaft preface, spare it for their fake; and alfo fpare the next city, because it is but a little

one.

I would excufe the performance of this tranflation, if it were all my own; but the better, though not the greater part, being the work of fome gentlemen, who have fucceeded very happily in their undertaking, let their excellencies atone for my imperfections, and those of my fons. I have perused fome of the fatires, which are done by other hands; and they feem to me as perfect in their kind, as any thing I have feen in English verfe. The common way which we have taken, is not a literal translation, but a kind of

paraphrase; or somewhat, which is yet more loose, betwixt a paraphrase and imitation. It was not poffible for us, or any men, to have made it pleasant any other way. If rendering the exact sense of those authors, almoft line for line, had been our business, Barten Holyday had done it already to our hands: and, by the help of his learned notes and illuftrations, not only Juvenal and Perfius, but, what yet is more obfcure, his own verfes, might be underftood.

But he wrote for fame, and wrote to fcholars : we write only for the pleasure and entertainment of those gentlemen and ladies, who, though they are not scholars, are not ignorant: perfons of underftanding and good fenfe, who, not having been converfant in the original, or at least not having made Latin verfe fo much their business as to be critics in it, would be glad to find, if the wit of our two great authors be anfwerable to their fame and reputation in the world. We have, therefore, endeavoured to give the public all the fatisfaction we are able in this kind.

We

And if we are not altogether so faithful to our author, as our predeceffors Holyday and Stapylton, yet we may challenge to ourselves this praife, that we shall be far more pleafing to our readers. have followed our authors at greater diftance, though not step by step, as they have done; for oftentimes they have gone fo clofe, that they have trod on the heels of Juvenal and Perfius, and hurt them by their too near approach. A noble author would not

be pursued too close by a tranflator. We lofe his spirit, when we think to take his body. The groffer part remains with us, but the foul is flown away in fome noble expreffion, or fome delicate turn of words, or thought. Thus Holyday, who made this way his choice, feized the meaning of Juvenal; but the poetry has always escaped him.

They who will not grant me, that pleasure is one of the ends of poetry, but that it is only a means of compaffing the only end, which is inftruction, muft yet allow, that, without the means of pleafure, the instruction is but a bare and dry philofophy: a crude preparation of morals, which we may have from Ariftotle and Epictetus, with more profit than from any poet. Neither Holyday nor Stapylton have imitated Juvenal in the poetical part of him-his diction and his elocution. Nor had they been poets, as neither of them were, yet, in the way they took, it was impoffible for them to have fucceeded in the poetic part.

The English verfe, which we call heroic, confifts of no more than ten fyllables; the Latin hexameter fometimes rises to feventeen; as, for example, this verfe in Virgil:

Pulverulenta putrem fonitu quatit ungula campum.

Here is the difference of no less than feven fyllables in a line, betwixt the English and the Latin. Now the medium of thefe is about fourteen fyllables; because the dactyle is a more frequent

foot in hexameters than the fpondee. But Holyday, without confidering that he wrote with the disadvantage of four fyllables lefs in every verse, endeavours to make one of his lines to comprehend the sense of one of Juvenal's. According to the falfity of the propofition was the fuccefs. He was forced to crowd his verfe with ill-founding monofyllables, of which our barbarous language affords him a wild plenty; and by that means he arrived at his pedantic end, which was to make a literal translation. His verfes have nothing of verse in them, but only the worst part of it-the rhyme; and that, into the bargain, is far from good. But, which is more intolerable, by cramming his illchofen, and worfe-founding monofyllables so close together, the very fenfe which he endeavours to explain, is become more obfcure than that of his author; fo that Holyday himself cannot be underftood, without as large a commentary as that which he makes on his two authors. For my own part, I can make a fhift to find the meaning of Juvenal without his notes: but his tranflation is more diffi cult than his author. And I find beauties in the Latin to recompenfe my pains; but, in Holyday and Stapylton, my ears, in the first place, are mortally offended; and then their fenfe is fo perplexed, that I return to the original, as the more pleafing talk, as well as the more easy.

This must be faid for our translation, that, if we give not the whole fenfe of Juvenal, yet we give the moft confiderable part of it: we give it, in ge

neral, fo clearly, that few notes are fufficient to make us intelligible. We make our author at least appear in a poetic drefs. We have actually made him more founding, 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 fometimes any of us (and it is but feldom) make him exprefs the cuftoms and manners of our native country rather than of Rome, it is, either when there was fome kind of analogy betwixt their cuftoms and ours, or when, to make him more eafy to vulgar understandings, we give him thofe manners which are familiar to us. But I defend not this innovation, it is enough if I can excuse it. For, to fpeak fincerely, 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 excufed, let it be pardoned at leaft, because it is acknowledged; and fo much the more eafily, as being a fault which is never committed without fome pleafure to the reader.

Thus, my lord, having troubled you with a tedious vifit, the beft manners will be fhewn in the leaft ceremony. I will flip away while your back is turned, and while you are otherwife employed; with great confufion for having entertained you fo long with this difcourfe, and for having no other recompence to make you, than the worthy labours of my fellow-undertakers in this work, and the