but the style and versification of Virgil and Ovid, are very different: yet I see, even in our best poets, who have translated some parts of them, that they have confounded their several talents; and by endeavouring only at the sweetness and harmony of numbers, have made them both so much alike, that if I did not know the originals, I should never be able to judge by the copies, which was Virgil, and which was Ovid. It was objected against a late noble painter, that he drew many graceful pictures, but few of them were like. And this happened to him, because he, always studied. himself, more than those who sat to him. In such translators I can easily distinguish the hand which performed the work, but I cannot distinguish their poet from another. Suppose two authors are equally sweet; yet there is as great distinction to be made in sweetness, as in that of sugar, and that of honey. I can make the difference more plain, by giving you (if it be worth knowing) my own method of proceeding, in my translations out of four several poets in this volume; Virgil, Theocritus, Lucretius, and Horace. In each of these, before I undertook them, I considered the genius and distinguishing character of my author. I looked on Virgil, as a succinct and grave majestick writer; one who weighed not only every thought,

Sir Peter Lely. He was born at Soest, in Westphalia, in 1617; came into England in the year 1641, and died of an apoplexy, as he was drawing the portrait of the Duchess of Somerset, November 30, 1680.

every

but every word and syllable; who was still aiming to crowd his sense into as narrow a compass as possibly he could; for which reason he is so very figurative, that he requires (I may almost say) a grammar apart to construe him. His verse where sounding the very thing in your ears, whose sense it bears yet the numbers are perpetually varied, to increase the delight of the reader; so that the same sounds are never repeated twice together. On the contrary, Ovid and Claudian, though they write in styles different from each other, yet have each of them but one sort of musick in their verses. All the versification and little variety of Claudian is included within the compass of four or five lines, and then he begins again in the same tenour; perpetually closing his sense at the end of a verse, and that verse commonly which they call golden, or two substantives and two adjectives, with a verb betwixt them to keep the peace. Ovid, with all his sweetness, has as little variety of numbers and sound as he: he is always as it were upon the hand-gallop, and his verse runs upon carpet-ground. He avoids, like the other, all synalephas, or cutting off one vowel, when it comes before another in the following word; so that minding only smoothness, he wants both variety and majesty.-But to return to Virgil: though he is smooth where smoothness is required, yet he is so far from affecting it, that he seems rather to disdain it; frequently makes use of synalepbas, and concludes his sense in the middle

of his verse. He is every where above conceits of epigrammatick wit, and gross hyperboles: hemaintains majesty in the midst of plainness; he shines, but glares not; and is stately without ambition (which is the vice of Lucan). I drew my definition of poetical wit' from my particular consideration of him: for propriety of thoughts and words are only to be found in him; and where they are proper, they will be delightful. Pleasure follows of necessity, as the effect does the cause; and therefore is not to be put into the definition. This exact propriety of Virgil I particularly regarded, as a great part of his character; but must confess to my shame, that I have not been able to translate any part of him so well, as to make him appear wholly like himself. For where the original is close, no version can

9 Here, for the first time, it is observable that our author has restrained and qualified his notion of wit, by adding the word poetical to it; and if he had done so in the former passages, where he has introduced the same topick, (see vol. i. p. 412, and vol. ii. p. 151,) his definition of wit, would, perhaps, have been less exceptionable. It is clear, that by wit, he means that sharpness of conceit (as he elsewhere calls it) and splendour of imagery, which is suited to poetry; and it is remarkable that he here informs us, he had VIRGIL particularly in view, when he gave this definition of poetical wit; the very author whom Addison has named for the purpose of shewing the impropriety of this definition of wit, when considered in its ordinary acceptation. Their reasoning on this subject, therefore, resembles the game of cross-purposes.

reach it in the same compass. Hannibal Caro's, in the Italian,' is the nearest, the most poetical, and the most sonorous of any translation of the Æneids; yet, though he takes the advantage of blank verse, he commonly allows two lines for one of Virgil, and does not always hit his sense. Tasso tells us in his letters, that Sperone Speroni, a great Italian wit, who was his contemporary, observed of Virgil and Tully, that the Latin orator endeavoured to imitate the copiousness of Homer, the Greek poet, and that the Latin poet made it his business to reach the conciseness of Demosthenes, the Greek orator. Virgil therefore, being so very sparing of his words, and leaving so much to be imagined by the reader, can never be translated as he ought, in any modern tongue. To make him copious, is to alter his character; and to translate him line for line, is impossible; because the Latin is naturally a more succinct language than either the Italian, Spanish, French, or even than the English, which by reason of its monosyllables is far the most compendious of them. Virgil is much the closest of any Roman poet, and the Latin hexameter has more feet than the English heroick.'

The best edition of Annibale Caro's version of the Æneid, according to Baretti, is that of Trevisa, printed in 1603, in quarto. There are many more ancient editions. of the same work. Annibale Caro died at Rome in 1566. Surely there is a great impropriety in talking of the feet of an English verse. English metre is regulated, not by feet, but by the number of syllables in each line, duly accented.

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Besides all this, an author has the choice of his own thoughts and words, which a translator has not; he is confined by the sense of the inventor to those expressions which are the nearest to it: so that Virgil studying brevity, and having the command of his own language, could bring those words into a narrow compass, which a translator cannot render without circumlocutions. In short, they who have called him the torture of grammarians, might also have called him the plague of translators; for he seems to have studied not to be translated. I own, that endeavouring to turn his Nisus and Euryalus as close as I was able, I have performed that episode too literally; that giving more scope to Mezentius and Lausus, that version which has more of the majesty of Virgil, has less of his conciseness; and all that I can 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 excells 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